It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of the West as a
new land. I suppose the idea gained ground because our own especial civilisation happens
to be new there; but nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up whole
chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains before recorded history
began. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists
put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B. C. We hear rumours of still
older things, too—of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today
only through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading out
pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits
from successive life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British author
spoke of Arizona as a “moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old—an
ancient, lonely land”.Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying—almost horrible—ancientness
of the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that happened in 1928; an incident
which I’d greatly like to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has left
such a frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can’t put it off very easily. It
was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me and where
I had come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no mistake—Oklahoma
is a lot more than a mere pioneers’ and promoters’ frontier. There are old, old
tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains
in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things.
I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of Yig,
Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much to
be “sophisticated” in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I’d
like to laugh it off—but I can’t.I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost
tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration,
and—I felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-air
ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they
had earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All
of them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western part of
the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a government
marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with a
wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres—battles
that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the
muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened by
moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time;
vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse
of the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously
haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring
horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the
ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes
and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were really
horses.The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk.
They referred to them as “those people”, “the old people”, or “they
who dwell below”, and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk
much about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any tale-teller down to a specific description
of the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians had
one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that “men very old, make very big
spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those
old people and spirits they mix up—get all the same”.Now all of this, of course, is “old stuff” to an ethnologist—of
a piece with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound among
the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his vain search for
the fabled Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and tangible—a
local and distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the outside world of
research, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of.
There was an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of Binger, in Caddo
County, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence
connected with the snake-god myth.The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in
a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile west of the
village—a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but which others believed to be
a burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers
said, was constantly haunted by two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old man
who paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with
only brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night with a blue-flamed
torch that glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon was bright the squaw’s
peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparition
was headless.Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of the
two visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost at all, but a living Indian who had killed
and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the mound. According to these theorists
he was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which took
visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their spectral beliefs, held
that both man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the squaw and himself as well at
some very distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to have been current ever
since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing
degree by still-existing phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales
offer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurking
in this small, obscure village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight
of scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and brooded
on strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelier
and lonelier landscape.Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flat
windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides the Indians
on a neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil
is decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train drew
in at twilight, and I felt rather lost and uneasy—cut off from wholesome and every-day
things—as it puffed away to the southward without me. The station platform was filled
with curious loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whom
I had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street whose rutted surface
was red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally delivered at the door of my prospective
host. Those who had arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high
intelligence and local responsibility, while his mother—who lived with him and was familiarly
known as “Grandma Compton”—was one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritable
mine of anecdote and folklore.That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the
villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a baffling and important
one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a matter of course by everyone in Binger.
Two generations had been born and grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and its
restless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned, so that the
village and the farms had not spread toward it in all four decades of settlement; yet venturesome
individuals had several times visited it. Some had come back to report that they saw no ghosts
at all when they neared the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of
sight before they reached the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore the
flat summit. There was nothing up there, they said—merely a rough expanse of underbrush.
Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected,
have descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although there
was no convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any opening into
the mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable exploration of the shrubbery and
tall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared that they
felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could describe nothing more definite
than that. It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished to
move. It is needless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothing
in the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to approach that sinister
elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in the
brightest sunlight.But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chief
terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical, the phenomenon
would have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact
that many other seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come back
at all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton had gone
with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious tales from the
Indians, and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who had been out to the mound
and had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass from the village while
the other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian
walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase existed on the top.
The other youth had not noticed how the Indian disappeared, but had merely found him gone upon
arriving at the mound.When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery,
and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound. Then
they saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after
the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation.
About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade and other belongings,
and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking abysses
and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and
of other fantastic abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. “Old! Old!
Old!” he would moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth,
and came here from somewhere else—they know what you think, and make you know what they
think—they’re half-man, half-ghost—crossed the line—melt and take shape again—getting
more and more so, yet we’re all descended from them in the beginning—children of
Tulu—everything made of gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä!
Shub-Niggurath!—that white man—oh, my God, what they did to him! . . .”Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died in
an epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-madness, and eight
of total disappearance. Immediately after Heaton’s mad return, three desperate and determined
men had gone out to the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes. Watching
villagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and afterward saw the men
climb the mound and begin scouting around through the underbrush. All at once they faded into
nothingness, and were never seen again. One watcher, with an especially powerful telescope,
thought he saw other forms dimly materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down into
the mound; but this account remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-party
went out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was wholly unvisited. Only when
the incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did anybody dare to think of further explorations.
Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to the shunned spot
and found nothing at all.By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of ’91 had largely faded into
the commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that is, had so faded
among the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians who thought much and kept
their own counsel. About this time a second wave of active curiosity and adventuring developed,
and several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and returned. Then came a trip of two
Eastern visitors with spades and other apparatus—a pair of amateur archaeologists connected
with a small college, who had been making studies among the Indians. No one watched this trip
from the village, but they never came back. The searching-party that went out after them—among
whom was my host Clyde Compton—found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer
who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had recalled
the mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement,
resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth had
given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations
for some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916,
watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain.
His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter.
No one could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a week
no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the night—there dragged
itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger
by as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black,
and its face—now distorted with nameless fright—free from wrinkles. But it did remind
Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in ’89. Its feet were
cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredible
if the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible
things, and kept repeating the name “George Lawton, George E. Lawton” as if trying
to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were
curiously like the hallucinations of poor young Heaton in ’91; though there were minor
differences. “The blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered the
object, “always down there, before there were any living things—older than the dinosaurs—always
the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and brooding—the
same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh, those beasts,
those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of gold—old, old, old, older than time—came
down from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .”
The object died before dawn.Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were
grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of them
had anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of
age put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.“You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those people. All under
here, all under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tiráwa,
big father of men, he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get old. Just same like
air. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring
up gold—they got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters
come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um ’lone,
you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back.
Keep ’way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.”If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief’s advice, they would
probably be here today; but they didn’t. They were great readers and materialists, and
feared nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters
inside the mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went again to avenge old Capt.
Lawton—boasting that they’d do it if they had to tear the mound down altogether. Clyde
Compton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars and saw them round the base of the sinister
hill. Evidently they meant to survey their territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed,
and they did not reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement of
the Great War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore. It was unvisited
from 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the youths
back from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a veritable epidemic of mound-visiting
among the prematurely hardened young veterans—an epidemic that waxed as one youth after
another returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920—so short is human memory—the mound
was almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered squaw began to displace darker whispers
on everybody’s tongues. Then two reckless young brothers—the especially unimaginative
and hard-boiled Clay boys—decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which
the old Indian had murdered her.They went out on a September afternoon—about the time the Indian tom-toms
begin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains. Nobody watched them, and
their parents did not become worried at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarm
and a searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-coloured
hair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the roots. On his forehead was
a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had vanished
he skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket which he
thrust into the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parents
that he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians—not Wichitas or Caddos—and
held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died under torture, but he himself had
managed to escape at a high cost. The experience had been particularly terrible, and he could
not talk about it just then. He must rest—and anyway, it would do no good to give an alarm
and try to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort that could be caught or punished,
and it was especially important for the good of Binger—for the good of the world—that
they be not pursued into their secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether what
one could call real Indians—he would explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest.
Better not to rouse the village with the news of his return—he would go upstairs and sleep.
Before he climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-room
table, and an automatic pistol from his father’s desk drawer.Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly through
his temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet of paper
on the rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub and
stove full of charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided not to tell
what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in a
curiously backhanded script—the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships—and
it read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always been stolid and matter-of-fact:

For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world so
devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was took into the thing just
melted at times and made up agen and the whole world outside is helpless alongside of what they
can do—they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are really
men or just gostes—and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance—you
cant tell how big the whole thing is—after what we seen I dont want to live aney more
France was nothing besides this—and see that people always keep away o god they wood if
they see poor walker like he was in the end.

Yrs truely
Ed Clay

At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay’s organs were transposed
from right to left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether they had always
been so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed had
been perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there was a mistake
somewhere, or whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an unsettled
question, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening
years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass at
it. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly
from the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paraded
by day and the glimmering will-o’-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted
at face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject.
It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every direction,
and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village was simply kept
trailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on
the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which children
and strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a
murderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful
old-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace
which clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed,
when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yet
rebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What influence had brought madness,
or the impulse of flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though vastly
impressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this matter,
as well I might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood and
shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walked
a few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were thinner. The half-moon
was still low, and had not blotted many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only the
westering gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I looked
out over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed. Then all at
once I saw a spark that was not a star—a bluish spark that moved and glimmered against
the Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent than
anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that this spark came from the top
of a long distant rise in the outspread and faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton with
a question.“Yes,” he answered, “it’s the blue ghost-light—and
that is the mound. There’s not a night in history that we haven’t seen it—and
not a living soul in Binger that would walk out over that plain toward it. It’s a bad
business, young man, and if you’re wise you’ll let it rest where it is. Better call
your search off, son, and tackle some of the other Injun legends around here. We’ve plenty
to keep you busy, heaven knows!”

II.

But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant room,
I could not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning with its chances to see the
daytime ghost and to question the Indians at the reservation. I meant to go about the whole
thing slowly and thoroughly, equipping myself with all available data both white and red before
I commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and dressed at dawn, and when I
heard others stirring I went downstairs. Compton was building the kitchen fire while his mother
was busy in the pantry. When he saw me he nodded, and after a moment invited me out into the
glamorous young sunlight. I knew where we were going, and as we walked along the lane I strained
my eyes westward over the plains.There was the mound—far away and very curious in its aspect of artificial
regularity. It must have been from thirty to forty feet high, and all of a hundred yards from
north to south as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that from east to west, Compton said,
but had the contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I knew, had been safely out to it and
back several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted against the deep blue of the west I tried
to follow its minor irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something moving upon
it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the high-powered binoculars which
Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing them hastily, I saw at first only a tangle of underbrush
on the distant mound’s rim—and then something stalked into the field.It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing the
daytime “Indian ghost” I did not wonder at the description, for surely the tall,
lean, darkly robed being with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery, expressionless, aquiline
face looked more like an Indian than anything else in my previous experience. And yet my trained
ethnologist’s eye told me at once that this was no redskin of any sort hitherto known
to history, but a creature of vast racial variation and of a wholly different culture-stream.
Modern Indians are brachycephalic—round-headed—and you can’t find any dolichocephalic
or long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating back 2500 years or more; yet
this man’s long-headedness was so pronounced that I recognised it at once, even at his vast distance
and in the uncertain field of the binoculars. I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe represented
a decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we recognise in southwestern native art.
There were shining metal trappings, likewise, and a short sword or kindred weapon at his side,
all wrought in a fashion wholly alien to anything I had ever heard of.As he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him for several
minutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of his stride and the poised way he
carried his head; and there was borne in upon me the strong, persistent conviction that this
man, whoever or whatever he might be, was certainly not a savage. He was the product
of a civilisation, I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation I could not guess.
At length he disappeared beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if descending the opposite
and unseen slope; and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture of puzzled feelings. Compton
was looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-committally, “What do you make of that?”
he ventured. “This is what we’ve seen here in Binger every day of our lives.”That noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey Eagle—who,
through some miracle, was still alive; though he must have been close to a hundred and fifty
years old. He was a strange, impressive figure—this stern, fearless leader of his kind
who had talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches
and three-cornered hats—and I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference toward
him, he appeared to like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately obstructive form as
soon as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me against the search I was
about to make.“You good boy—you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devil
under there—catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back. Just same
when me boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All time buck he walk in day, squaw
with no head she walk in night. All time since white man with tin coats they come from sunset
and below big river—long way back—three, four times more back than Grey Eagle—two
times more back than Frenchmen—all same after then. More back than that, nobody go near
little hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still more back, those old ones no hide, come
out and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change.
Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. They no die—no get old like Grey Eagle
with valleys in face and snow on head. Just same like air—some man, some spirit. Bad medicine.
Sometimes at night spirit come out on half-man–half-horse-with-horn and fight where men once
fight. Keep ’way them place. No good. You good boy—go ’way and let them old
ones ’lone.”That was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the Indians
would say nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was clearly more so; for he obviously
felt a real regret at the thought of my invading the region he feared so abjectly. As I turned
to leave the reservation he stopped me for a final ceremonial farewell, and once more tried
to get my promise to abandon my search. When he saw that he could not, he produced something
half-timidly from a buckskin pouch he wore, and extended it toward me very solemnly. It was
a worn but finely minted metal disc about two inches in diameter, oddly figured and perforated,
and suspended from a leathern cord.“You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if anything
help um, this good medicine. Come from my father—he get from he father—he get from
he father—all way back, close to Tiráwa, all men’s father. My father say,
‘You keep ’way from those old ones, keep ’way from little hills and valleys
with stone caves. But if old ones they come out to get you, then you shew um this medicine.
They know. They make him long way back. They look, then they no do such bad medicine maybe.
But no can tell. You keep ’way, just same. Them no good. No tell what they do.’”As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw it
was a very curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more I marvelled; for not only
was its heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance an absolutely strange metal to
me, but what was left of its design seemed to be of a marvellously artistic and utterly unknown
workmanship. One side, so far as I could see, had borne an exquisitely modelled serpent design;
whilst the other side had depicted a kind of octopus or other tentacled monster. There were
some half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which no archaeologist could identify or even
place conjecturally. With Grey Eagle’s permission I later had expert historians, anthropologists,
geologists, and chemists pass carefully upon the disc, but from them I obtained only a chorus
of bafflement. It defied either classification or analysis. The chemists called it an amalgam
of unknown metallic elements of heavy atomic weight, and one geologist suggested that the substance
must be of meteoric origin, shot from unknown gulfs of interstellar space. Whether it really
saved my life or sanity or existence as a human being I cannot attempt to say, but Grey Eagle
is sure of it. He has it again, now, and I wonder if it has any connexion with his inordinate
age. All his fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing only in battle.
Is it possible that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents, will never die? But I am ahead of my
story.When I returned to the village I tried to secure more mound-lore, but found
only excited gossip and opposition. It was really flattering to see how solicitous the people
were about my safety, but I had to set their almost frantic remonstrances aside. I shewed them
Grey Eagle’s charm, but none of them had ever heard of it before, or seen anything even
remotely like it. They agreed that it could not be an Indian relic, and imagined that the old
chief’s ancestors must have obtained it from some trader.When they saw they could not deter me from my trip, the Binger citizens sadly
did what they could to aid my outfitting. Having known before my arrival the sort of work to
be done, I had most of my supplies already with me—machete and trench-knife for shrub-clearing
and excavating, electric torches for any underground phase which might develop, rope, field-glasses,
tape-measure, microscope, and incidentals for emergencies—as much, in fact, as might be
comfortably stowed in a convenient handbag. To this equipment I added only the heavy revolver
which the sheriff forced upon me, and the pick and shovel which I thought might expedite my
work.I decided to carry these latter things slung over my shoulder with a stout
cord—for I soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers or fellow-explorers. The village
would watch me, no doubt, with all its available telescopes and field-glasses; but it would
not send any citizen so much as a yard over the flat plain toward the lone hillock. My start
was timed for early the next morning, and all the rest of that day I was treated with the awed
and uneasy respect which people give to a man about to set out for certain doom.When morning came—a cloudy though not a threatening morning—the
whole village turned out to see me start across the dustblown plain. Binoculars shewed the lone
man at his usual pacing on the mound, and I resolved to keep him in sight as steadily as possible
during my approach. At the last moment a vague sense of dread oppressed me, and I was just weak
and whimsical enough to let Grey Eagle’s talisman swing on my chest in full view of any
beings or ghosts who might be inclined to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and his mother,
I started off at a brisk stride despite the bag in my left hand and the clanking pick and shovel
strapped to my back; holding my field-glass in my right hand and taking a glance at the silent
pacer from time to time. As I neared the mound I saw the man very clearly, and fancied I could
trace an expression of infinite evil and decadence on his seamed, hairless features. I was startled,
too, to see that his goldenly gleaming weapon-case bore hieroglyphs very similar to those on
the unknown talisman I wore. All the creature’s costume and trappings bespoke exquisite
workmanship and cultivation. Then, all too abruptly, I saw him start down the farther side of
the mound and out of sight. When I reached the place, about ten minutes after I set out, there
was no one there.There is no need of relating how I spent the early part of my search in surveying
and circumnavigating the mound, taking measurements, and stepping back to view the thing from
different angles. It had impressed me tremendously as I approached it, and there seemed to be
a kind of latent menace in its too regular outlines. It was the only elevation of any sort on
the wide, level plain; and I could not doubt for a moment that it was an artificial tumulus.
The steep sides seemed wholly unbroken, and without marks of human tenancy or passage. There
were no signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened as I was, I managed to scramble up only
with considerable difficulty. When I reached the summit I found a roughly level elliptical plateau
about 300 by 50 feet in dimensions; uniformly covered with rank grass and dense underbrush,
and utterly incompatible with the constant presence of a pacing sentinel. This condition gave
me a real shock, for it shewed beyond question that the “Old Indian”, vivid though
he seemed, could not be other than a collective hallucination.I looked about with considerable perplexity and alarm, glancing wistfully back
at the village and the mass of black dots which I knew was the watching crowd. Training my glass
upon them, I saw that they were studying me avidly with their glasses; so to reassure them I
waved my cap in the air with a show of jauntiness which I was far from feeling. Then, settling
to my work I flung down pick, shovel, and bag; taking my machete from the latter and commencing
to clear away underbrush. It was a weary task, and now and then I felt a curious shiver as some
perverse gust of wind arose to hamper my motion with a skill approaching deliberateness. At
times it seemed as if a half-tangible force were pushing me back as I worked—almost as
if the air thickened in front of me, or as if formless hands tugged at my wrists. My energy
seemed used up without producing adequate results, yet for all that I made some progress.By afternoon I had clearly perceived that, toward the northern end of the mound,
there was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled earth. While this might mean nothing,
it would be a good place to begin when I reached the digging stage, and I made a mental note
of it. At the same time I noticed another and very peculiar thing—namely, that the Indian
talisman swinging from my neck seemed to behave oddly at a point about seventeen feet southeast
of the suggested bowl. Its gyrations were altered whenever I happened to stoop around that point,
and it tugged downward as if attracted by some magnetism in the soil. The more I noticed this,
the more it struck me, till at length I decided to do a little preliminary digging there without
further delay.As I turned up the soil with my trench-knife I could not help wondering at
the relative thinness of the reddish regional layer. The country as a whole was all red sandstone
earth, but here I found a strange black loam less than a foot down. It was such soil as one
finds in the strange, deep valleys farther west and south, and must surely have been brought
from a considerable distance in the prehistoric age when the mound was reared. Kneeling and
digging, I felt the leathern cord around my neck tugged harder and harder, as something in the
soil seemed to draw the heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I felt my implements strike
a hard surface, and wondered if a rock layer rested beneath. Prying about with the trench-knife,
I found that such was not the case. Instead, to my intense surprise and feverish interest, I
brought up a mould-clogged, heavy object of cylindrical shape—about a foot long and four
inches in diameter—to which my hanging talisman clove with glue-like tenacity. As I cleared
off the black loam my wonder and tension increased at the bas-reliefs revealed by that process.
The whole cylinder, ends and all, was covered with figures and hieroglyphs; and I saw with growing
excitement that these things were in the same unknown tradition as those on Grey Eagle’s
charm and on the yellow metal trappings of the ghost I had seen through my binoculars.Sitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic cylinder against the rough corduroy
of my knickerbockers, and observed that it was made of the same heavy, lustrous unknown metal
as the charm—hence, no doubt, the singular attraction. The carvings and chasings were very strange
and very horrible—nameless monsters and designs fraught with insidious evil—and
all were of the highest finish and craftsmanship. I could not at first make head or tail of
the thing, and handled it aimlessly until I spied a cleavage near one end. Then I sought eagerly
for some mode of opening, discovering at last that the end simply unscrewed.The cap yielded with difficulty, but at last it came off, liberating a curious
aromatic odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll of a yellowish, paper-like substance inscribed
in greenish characters, and for a second I had the supreme thrill of fancying that I held a
written key to unknown elder worlds and abysses beyond time. Almost immediately, however, the
unrolling of one end shewed that the manuscript was in Spanish—albeit the formal, pompous
Spanish of a long-departed day. In the golden sunset light I looked at the heading and the opening
paragraph, trying to decipher the wretched and ill-punctuated script of the vanished writer.
What manner of relic was this? Upon what sort of a discovery had I stumbled? The first words
set me in a new fury of excitement and curiosity, for instead of diverting me from my original
quest they startlingly confirmed me in that very effort.The yellow scroll with the green script began with a bold, identifying caption
and a ceremoniously desperate appeal for belief in incredible revelations to follow:

I paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was reading. “The
Narrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias,
Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545” . . . Here,
surely, was too much for any mind to absorb all at once. A subterranean world—again that
persistent idea which filtered through all the Indian tales and through all the utterances of
those who had come back from the mound. And the date—1545—what could this mean?
In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they not
turned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly down the opened part of the scroll, and almost at
once seized on the name Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The writer of this thing,
clearly, was one of Coronado’s men—but what had he been doing in this remote realm
three years after his party had gone back? I must read further, for another glance told me that
what was now unrolled was merely a summary of Coronado’s northward march, differing in
no essential way from the account known to history.It was only the waning light which checked me before I could unroll and read
more, and in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot to be frightened at the onrush of night
in this sinister place. Others, however, had not forgotten the lurking terror, for I heard a
loud distant hallooing from a knot of men who had gathered at the edge of the town. Answering
the anxious hail, I restored the manuscript to its strange cylinder—to which the disc
around my neck still clung until I pried it off and packed it and my smaller implements for
departure. Leaving the pick and shovel for the next day’s work, I took up my handbag,
scrambled down the steep side of the mound, and in another quarter-hour was back in the village
explaining and exhibiting my curious find. As darkness drew on, I glanced back at the mound
I had so lately left, and saw with a shudder that the faint bluish torch of the nocturnal squaw-ghost
had begun to glimmer.It was hard work waiting to get at the bygone Spaniard’s narrative; but
I knew I must have quiet and leisure for a good translation, so reluctantly saved the task for
the later hours of night. Promising the townsfolk a clear account of my findings in the morning,
and giving them an ample opportunity to examine the bizarre and provocative cylinder, I accompanied
Clyde Compton home and ascended to my room for the translating process as soon as I possibly
could. My host and his mother were intensely eager to hear the tale, but I thought they had
better wait till I could thoroughly absorb the text myself and give them the gist concisely
and unerringly.Opening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took out
the cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the Indian talisman to its carven
surface. The designs glimmered evilly on the richly lustrous and unknown metal, and I could
not help shivering as I studied the abnormal and blasphemous forms that leered at me with such
exquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had carefully photographed all these designs—though
perhaps it is just as well that I did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that I
could not then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most of the ornate
cartouches, and which the manuscript called “Tulu”. Recently I have associated it,
and the legends in the manuscript connected with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrous
and unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped down from the stars while the young earth was
still half-formed; and had I known of the connexion then, I could not have stayed in the same
room with the thing. The secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did quite readily
place as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan conceptions. Before opening the
cylinder I tested its magnetic powers on metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s disc,
but found that no attraction existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this morbid
fragment of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind.At last I took out the manuscript and began translating—jotting down a synoptic
outline in English as I went, and now and then regretting the absence of a Spanish dictionary
when I came upon some especially obscure or archaic word or construction. There was a sense
of ineffable strangeness in thus being thrown back nearly four centuries in the midst of my
continuous quest—thrown back to a year when my own forbears were settled, homekeeping
gentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry the Eighth, with never a thought of the adventure
that was to take their blood to Virginia and the New World; yet when that new world possessed,
even as now, the same brooding mystery of the mound which formed my present sphere and horizon.
The sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that the common problem
of the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal timelessness—of such unholy and unearthly
eternity—that the scant four hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison.
It took no more than a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realise
the dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the primal mysteries it
represented. Before that gulf Pánfilo de Zamacona and I stood side by side; just as Aristotle
and I, or Cheops and I, might have stood.

III.

Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port on the Bay of Biscay, Zamacona
told little. He had been wild, and a younger son, and had come to New Spain in 1532, when only
twenty years old. Sensitively imaginative, he had listened spellbound to the floating rumours
of rich cities and unknown worlds to the north—and especially to the tale of the Franciscan
friar Marcos de Niza, who came back from a trip in 1539 with glowing accounts of fabulous Cíbola
and its great walled towns with terraced stone houses. Hearing of Coronado’s contemplated
expedition in search of these wonders—and of the greater wonders whispered to lie beyond
them in the land of buffaloes—young Zamacona managed to join the picked party of 300,
and started north with the rest in 1540.History knows the story of that expedition—how Cíbola was found
to be merely the squalid Pueblo village of Zuñi, and how de Niza was sent back to Mexico
in disgrace for his florid exaggerations; how Coronado first saw the Grand Canyon, and how at
Cicuyé, on the Pecos, he heard from the Indian called El Turco of the rich and mysterious
land of Quivira, far to the northeast, where gold, silver, and buffaloes abounded, and where
there flowed a river two leagues wide. Zamacona told briefly of the winter camp at Tiguex on
the Pecos, and of the northward start in April, when the native guide proved false and led the
party astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs, salt pools, and roving, bison-hunting tribes.When Coronado dismissed his larger force and made his final forty-two-day march
with a very small and select detachment, Zamacona managed to be included in the advancing party.
He spoke of the fertile country and of the great ravines with trees visible only from the edge
of their steep banks; and of how all the men lived solely on buffalo-meat. And then came mention
of the expedition’s farthest limit—of the presumable but disappointing land of Quivira
with its villages of grass houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black soil, its plums, nuts,
grapes, and mulberries, and its maize-growing and copper-using Indians. The execution of El
Turco, the false native guide, was casually touched upon, and there was a mention of the cross
which Coronado raised on the bank of a great river in the autumn of 1541—a cross bearing
the inscription, “Thus far came the great general, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado”.This supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth parallel of north latitude,
and I see that quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr. Hodge has identified it with the
course of the Arkansas River through Barton and Rice Counties, Kansas. It is the old home of
the Wichitas, before the Sioux drove them south into what is now Oklahoma, and some of the grass-house
village sites have been found and excavated for artifacts. Coronado did considerable exploring
hereabouts, led hither and thither by the persistent rumours of rich cities and hidden worlds
which floated fearfully around on the Indians’ tongues. These northerly natives seemed
more afraid and reluctant to talk about the rumoured cities and worlds than the Mexican Indians
had been; yet at the same time seemed as if they could reveal a good deal more than the Mexicans
had they been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness exasperated the Spanish leader, and
after many disappointing searches he began to be very severe toward those who brought him stories.
Zamacona, more patient than Coronado, found the tales especially interesting; and learned enough
of the local speech to hold long conversations with a young buck named Charging Buffalo, whose
curiosity had led him into much stranger places than any of his fellow-tribesmen had dared to
penetrate.It was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona of the queer stone doorways, gates,
or cave-mouths at the bottom of some of those deep, steep, wooded ravines which the party had
noticed on the northward march. These openings, he said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery;
and few had entered them for untold aeons. Those who went to where they led, never returned—or
in a few cases returned mad or curiously maimed. But all this was legend, for nobody was known
to have gone more than a limited distance inside any of them within the memory of the grandfathers
of the oldest living men. Charging Buffalo himself had probably been farther than anyone else,
and he had seen enough to curb both his curiosity and his greed for the rumoured gold below.Beyond the aperture he had entered there was a long passage running crazily
up and down and round about, and covered with frightful carvings of monsters and horrors that
no man had ever seen. At last, after untold miles of windings and descents, there was a glow
of terrible blue light; and the passage opened upon a shocking nether world. About this the
Indian would say no more, for he had seen something that had sent him back in haste. But the
golden cities must be somewhere down there, he added, and perhaps a white man with the magic
of the thunder-stick might succeed in getting to them. He would not tell the big chief Coronado
what he knew, for Coronado would not listen to Indian talk any more. Yes—he could shew
Zamacona the way if the white man would leave the party and accept his guidance. But he would
not go inside the opening with the white man. It was bad in there.The place was about a five days’ march to the south, near the region
of great mounds. These mounds had something to do with the evil world down there—they
were probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the Old Ones below had had colonies
on the surface and had traded with men everywhere, even in the lands that had sunk under the
big waters. It was when those lands had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up below and
refused to deal with surface people. The refugees from the sinking places had told them that
the gods of outer earth were against men, and that no men could survive on the outer earth unless
they were daemons in league with the evil gods. That is why they shut out all surface folk,
and did fearful things to any who ventured down where they dwelt. There had been sentries once
at the various openings, but after ages they were no longer needed. Not many people cared to
talk about the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about them would probably have died out but
for certain ghostly reminders of their presence now and then. It seemed that the infinite ancientness
of these creatures had brought them strangely near to the borderline of spirit, so that their
ghostly emanations were more commonly frequent and vivid. Accordingly the region of the great
mounds was often convulsed with spectral nocturnal battles reflecting those which had been fought
in the days before the openings were closed.The Old Ones themselves were half-ghost—indeed, it was said that they
no longer grew old or reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally in a state between flesh
and spirit. The change was not complete, though, for they had to breathe. It was because the
underground world needed air that the openings in the deep valleys were not blocked up as the
mound-openings on the plains had been. These openings, Charging Buffalo added, were probably
based on natural fissures in the earth. It was whispered that the Old Ones had come down from
the stars to the world when it was very young, and had gone inside to build their cities of
solid gold because the surface was not then fit to live on. They were the ancestors of all men,
yet none could guess from what star—or what place beyond the stars—they came. Their
hidden cities were still full of gold and silver, but men had better let them alone unless protected
by very strong magic.They had frightful beasts with a faint strain of human blood, on which they
rode, and which they employed for other purposes. The things, so people hinted, were carnivorous,
and like their masters, preferred human flesh; so that although the Old Ones themselves did
not breed, they had a sort of half-human slave-class which also served to nourish the human
and animal population. This had been very oddly recruited, and was supplemented by a second
slave-class of reanimated corpses. The Old Ones knew how to make a corpse into an automaton
which would last almost indefinitely and perform any sort of work when directed by streams of
thought. Charging Buffalo said that the people had all come to talk by means of thought only;
speech having been found crude and needless, except for religious devotions and emotional expression,
as aeons of discovery and study rolled by. They worshipped Yig, the great father of serpents,
and Tulu, the octopus-headed entity that had brought them down from the stars; appeasing both
of these hideous monstrosities by means of human sacrifices offered up in a very curious manner
which Charging Buffalo did not care to describe.Zamacona was held spellbound by the Indian’s tale, and at once resolved
to accept his guidance to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did not believe the accounts
of strange ways attributed by legend to the hidden people, for the experiences of the party
had been such as to disillusion one regarding native myths of unknown lands; but he did feel
that some sufficiently marvellous field of riches and adventure must indeed lie beyond the weirdly
carved passages in the earth. At first he thought of persuading Charging Buffalo to tell his
story to Coronado—offering to shield him against any effects of the leader’s testy
scepticism—but later he decided that a lone adventure would be better. If he had no aid,
he would not have to share anything he found; but might perhaps become a great discoverer and
owner of fabulous riches. Success would make him a greater figure than Coronado himself—perhaps
a greater figure than anyone else in New Spain, including even the mighty viceroy Don Antonio
de Mendoza.On October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight, Zamacona stole out of the
Spanish camp near the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo for the long southward journey.
He travelled as lightly as possible, and did not wear his heavy helmet and breastplate. Of the
details of the trip the manuscript told very little, but Zamacona records his arrival at the
great ravine on October 13th. The descent of the thickly wooded slope took no great time; and
though the Indian had trouble in locating the shrubbery-hidden stone door again amidst the twilight
of that deep gorge, the place was finally found. It was a very small aperture as doorways go,
formed of monolithic sandstone jambs and lintel, and bearing signs of nearly effaced and now
undecipherable carvings. Its height was perhaps seven feet, and its width not more than four.
There were drilled places in the jambs which argued the bygone presence of a hinged door or
gate, but all other traces of such a thing had long since vanished.At sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo displayed considerable fear, and
threw down his pack of supplies with signs of haste. He had provided Zamacona with a good stock
of resinous torches and provisions, and had guided him honestly and well; but refused to share
in the venture that lay ahead. Zamacona gave him the trinkets he had kept for such an occasion,
and obtained his promise to return to the region in a month; afterward shewing the way southward
to the Pecos Pueblo villages. A prominent rock on the plain above them was chosen as a meeting-place;
the one arriving first to pitch camp until the other should arrive.In the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful wonder as to the Indian’s
length of waiting at the rendezvous—for he himself could never keep that tryst. At the
last moment Charging Buffalo tried to dissuade him from his plunge into the darkness, but soon
saw it was futile, and gestured a stoical farewell. Before lighting his first torch and entering
the opening with his ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the lean form of the Indian scrambling
hastily and rather relievedly upward among the trees. It was the cutting of his last link with
the world; though he did not know that he was never to see a human being—in the accepted
sense of that term—again.Zamacona felt no immediate premonition of evil upon entering that ominous doorway,
though from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre and unwholesome atmosphere. The passage,
slightly taller and wider than the aperture, was for many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopean
masonry, with heavily worn flagstones under foot, and grotesquely carved granite and sandstone
blocks in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have been loathsome and terrible indeed, to judge
from Zamacona’s description; according to which most of them revolved around the monstrous
beings Yig and Tulu. They were unlike anything the adventurer had ever seen before, though he
added that the native architecture of Mexico came closest to them of all things in the outer
world. After some distance the tunnel began to dip abruptly, and irregular natural rock appeared
on all sides. The passage seemed only partly artificial, and decorations were limited to occasional
cartouches with shocking bas-reliefs.Following an enormous descent, whose steepness at times produced an acute danger
of slipping and tobogganing, the passage became exceedingly uncertain in its direction and variable
in its contour. At times it narrowed almost to a slit or grew so low that stooping and even
crawling were necessary, while at other times it broadened out into sizeable caves or chains
of caves. Very little human construction, it was plain, had gone into this part of the tunnel;
though occasionally a sinister cartouche or hieroglyphic on the wall, or a blocked-up lateral
passageway, would remind Zamacona that this was in truth the aeon-forgotten high-road to a primal
and unbelievable world of living things.For three days, as best he could reckon, Pánfilo de Zamacona scrambled
down, up, along, and around, but always predominately downward, through this dark region of
palaeogean night. Once in a while he heard some secret being of darkness patter or flap out
of his way, and on just one occasion he half glimpsed a great, bleached thing that set him trembling.
The quality of the air was mostly very tolerable; though foetid zones were now and then met
with, while one great cavern of stalactites and stalagmites afforded a depressing dampness.
This latter, when Charging Buffalo had come upon it, had quite seriously barred the way; since
the limestone deposits of ages had built fresh pillars in the path of the primordial abyss-denizens.
The Indian, however, had broken through these; so that Zamacona did not find his course impeded.
It was an unconscious comfort to him to reflect that someone else from the outside world had
been there before—and the Indian’s careful descriptions had removed the element
of surprise and unexpectedness. More—Charging Buffalo’s knowledge of the tunnel
had led him to provide so good a torch supply for the journey in and out, that there would be
no danger of becoming stranded in darkness. Zamacona camped twice, building a fire whose smoke
seemed well taken care of by the natural ventilation.At what he considered the end of the third day—though his cocksure guesswork
chronology is not at any time to be given the easy faith that he gave it—Zamacona encountered
the prodigious descent and subsequent prodigious climb which Charging Buffalo had described
as the tunnel’s last phase. As at certain earlier points, marks of artificial improvement
were here discernible; and several times the steep gradient was eased by a flight of rough-hewn
steps. The torch shewed more and more of the monstrous carvings on the walls, and finally the
resinous flare seemed mixed with a fainter and more diffusive light as Zamacona climbed up and
up after the last downward stairway. At length the ascent ceased, and a level passage of artificial
masonry with dark, basaltic blocks led straight ahead. There was no need for a torch now, for
all the air was glowing with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that flickered like an aurora.
It was the strange light of the inner world that the Indian had described—and in another
moment Zamacona emerged from the tunnel upon a bleak, rocky hillside which climbed above him
to a seething, impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and descended dizzily below him to an
apparently illimitable plain shrouded in bluish mist.He had come to the unknown world at last, and from his manuscript it is clear
that he viewed the formless landscape as proudly and exaltedly as ever his fellow-countryman
Balboa viewed the new-found Pacific from that unforgettable peak in Darien. Charging Buffalo
had turned back at this point, driven by fear of something which he would only describe vaguely
and evasively as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor buffalo, but like the things the mound-spirits
rode at night—but Zamacona could not be deterred by any such trifle. Instead of fear,
a strange sense of glory filled him; for he had imagination enough to know what it meant to
stand alone in an inexplicable nether world whose existence no other white man suspected.The soil of the great hill that surged upward behind him and spread steeply
downward below him was dark grey, rock-strown, without vegetation, and probably basaltic in
origin; with an unearthly cast which made him feel like an intruder on an alien planet. The
vast distant plain, thousands of feet below, had no features he could distinguish; especially
since it appeared to be largely veiled in a curling, bluish vapour. But more than hill or plain
or cloud, the bluely luminous, coruscating sky impressed the adventurer with a sense of supreme
wonder and mystery. What created this sky within a world he could not tell; though he knew of
the northern lights, and had even seen them once or twice. He concluded that this subterraneous
light was something vaguely akin to the aurora; a view which moderns may well endorse, though
it seems likely that certain phenomena of radio-activity may also enter in.At Zamacona’s back the mouth of the tunnel he had traversed yawned darkly;
defined by a stone doorway very like the one he had entered in the world above, save that it
was of greyish-black basalt instead of red sandstone. There were hideous sculptures, still in
good preservation and perhaps corresponding to those on the outer portal which time had largely
weathered away. The absence of weathering here argued a dry, temperate climate; indeed, the
Spaniard already began to note the delightfully spring-like stability of temperature which marks
the air of the north’s interior. On the stone jambs were works proclaiming the bygone
presence of hinges, but of any actual door or gate no trace remained. Seating himself for rest
and thought, Zamacona lightened his pack by removing an amount of food and torches sufficient
to take him back through the tunnel. These he proceeded to cache at the opening, under a cairn
hastily formed of the rock fragments which everywhere lay around. Then, readjusting his lightened
pack, he commenced his descent toward the distant plain; preparing to invade a region which
no living thing of outer earth had penetrated in a century or more, which no white man had ever
penetrated, and from which, if legend were to be believed, no organic creature had ever returned
sane.Zamacona strode briskly along down the steep, interminable slope; his progress
checked at times by the bad walking that came from loose rock fragments, or by the excessive
precipitousness of the grade. The distance of the mist-shrouded plain must have been enormous,
for many hours’ walking brought him apparently no closer to it than he had been before.
Behind him was always the great hill stretching upward into a bright aërial sea of bluish
coruscations. Silence was universal; so that his own footsteps, and the fall of stones that
he dislodged, struck on his ears with startling distinctness. It was at what he regarded as
about noon that he first saw the abnormal footprints which set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo’s
terrible hints, precipitate flight, and strangely abiding terror.The rock-strown nature of the soil gave few opportunities for tracks of any
kind, but at one point a rather level interval had caused the loose detritus to accumulate in
a ridge, leaving a considerable area of dark-grey loam absolutely bare. Here, in a rambling
confusion indicating a large herd aimlessly wandering, Zamacona found the abnormal prints. It
is to be regretted that he could not describe them more exactly, but the manuscript displayed
far more vague fear than accurate observation. Just what it was that so frightened the Spaniard
can only be inferred from his later hints regarding the beasts. He referred to the prints as
‘not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor precisely paws—nor so large as to cause alarm
on that account’. Just why or how long ago the things had been there, was not easy to
guess. There was no vegetation visible, hence grazing was out of the question; but of course
if the beasts were carnivorous they might well have been hunting smaller animals, whose tracks
their own would tend to obliterate.Glancing backward from this plateau to the heights above, Zamacona thought
he detected traces of a great winding road which had once led from the tunnel downward to the
plain. One could get the impression of this former highway only from a broad panoramic view,
since a trickle of loose rock fragments had long ago obscured it; but the adventurer felt none
the less certain that it had existed. It had not, probably, been an elaborately paved trunk
route; for the small tunnel it reached seemed scarcely like a main avenue to the outer world.
In choosing a straight path of descent Zamacona had not followed its curving course, though
he must have crossed it once or twice. With his attention now called to it, he looked ahead
to see if he could trace it downward toward the plain; and this he finally thought he could
do. He resolved to investigate its surface when next he crossed it, and perhaps to pursue its
line for the rest of the way if he could distinguish it.Having resumed his journey, Zamacona came some time later upon what he thought
was a bend of the ancient road. There were signs of grading and of some primal attempt at rock-surfacing,
but not enough was left to make the route worth following. While rummaging about in the soil
with his sword, the Spaniard turned up something that glittered in the eternal blue daylight,
and was thrilled at beholding a kind of coin or medal of a dark, unknown, lustrous metal, with
hideous designs on each side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien to him, and from his description
I have no doubt but that it was a duplicate of the talisman given me by Grey Eagle almost four
centuries afterward. Pocketing it after a long and curious examination, he strode onward; finally
pitching camp at an hour which he guessed to be the evening of the outer world.The next day Zamacona rose early and resumed his descent through this blue-litten
world of mist and desolation and preternatural silence. As he advanced, he at last became able
to distinguish a few objects on the distant plain below—trees, bushes, rocks, and a small
river that came into view from the right and curved forward at a point to the left of his contemplated
course. This river seemed to be spanned by a bridge connected with the descending roadway, and
with care the explorer could trace the route of the road beyond it in a straight line over the
plain. Finally he even thought he could detect towns scattered along the rectilinear ribbon;
towns whose left-hand edges reached the river and sometimes crossed it. Where such crossings
occurred, he saw as he descended, there were always signs of bridges either ruined or surviving.
He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy vegetation, and saw that below him the growth became
thicker and thicker. The road was easier to define now, since its surface discouraged the grass
which the looser soil supported. Rock fragments were less frequent, and the barren upward vista
behind him looked bleak and forbidding in contrast to his present milieu.It was on this day that he saw the blurred mass moving over the distant plain.
Since his first sight of the sinister footprints he had met with no more of these, but something
about that slowly and deliberately moving mass peculiarly sickened him. Nothing but a herd of
grazing animals could move just like that, and after seeing the footprints he did not wish to
meet the things which had made them. Still, the moving mass was not near the road—and
his curiosity and greed for fabled gold were great. Besides, who could really judge things from
vague, jumbled footprints or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant Indian?In straining his eyes to view the moving mass Zamacona became aware of several
other interesting things. One was that certain parts of the now unmistakable towns glittered
oddly in the misty blue light. Another was that, besides the towns, several similarly glittering
structures of a more isolated sort were scattered here and there along the road and over the
plain. They seemed to be embowered in clumps of vegetation, and those off the road had small
avenues leading to the highway. No smoke or other signs of life could be discerned about any
of the towns or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the plain was not infinite in extent, though
the half-concealing blue mists had hitherto made it seem so. It was bounded in the remote distance
by a range of low hills, toward a gap in which the river and roadway seemed to lead. All this—especially
the glittering of certain pinnacles in the towns—had become very vivid when Zamacona pitched
his second camp amidst the endless blue day. He likewise noticed the flocks of high-soaring
birds, whose nature he could not clearly make out.The next afternoon—to use the language of the outer world as the manuscript
did at all times—Zamacona reached the silent plain and crossed the soundless, slow-running
river on a curiously carved and fairly well-preserved bridge of black basalt. The water was
clear, and contained large fishes of a wholly strange aspect. The roadway was now paved and
somewhat overgrown with weeds and creeping vines, and its course was occasionally outlined by
small pillars bearing obscure symbols. On every side the grassy level extended, with here and
there a clump of trees or shrubbery, and with unidentifiable bluish flowers growing irregularly
over the whole area. Now and then some spasmodic motion of the grass indicated the presence
of serpents. In the course of several hours the traveller reached a grove of old and alien-looking
evergreen-trees which he knew, from distant viewing, protected one of the glittering-roofed
isolated structures. Amidst the encroaching vegetation he saw the hideously sculptured pylons
of a stone gateway leading off the road, and was presently forcing his way through briers above
a moss-crusted tessellated walk lined with huge trees and low monolithic pillars.At last, in this hushed green twilight, he saw the crumbling and ineffably
ancient facade of the building—a temple, he had no doubt. It was a mass of nauseous bas-reliefs;
depicting scenes and beings, objects and ceremonies, which could certainly have no place on
this or any sane planet. In hinting of these things Zamacona displays for the first time that
shocked and pious hesitancy which impairs the informative value of the rest of his manuscript.
We cannot help regretting that the Catholic ardour of Renaissance Spain had so thoroughly permeated
his thought and feeling. The door of the place stood wide open, and absolute darkness filled
the windowless interior. Conquering the repulsion which the mural sculptures had excited, Zamacona
took out flint and steel, lighted a resinous torch, pushed aside curtaining vines, and sallied
boldly across the ominous threshold.For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-covering
dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things, the shriekingly loathsome
sculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal
altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, dark
metal leering and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of even
the power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but merely the fact
that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things, and the gigantic emerald-eyed
idol, every particle of substance in sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.Even the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that gold is
the most common structural metal of a nether world containing limitless lodes and veins of it,
reflects the frenzied excitement which the traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real source
of all the Indian legends of golden cities. For a time the power of detailed observation left
him, but in the end his faculties were recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in the pocket
of his doublet. Tracing the feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had found
in the abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed, emerald-eyed
idol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of the same unknown exotic metal. He was
later to learn that this strange magnetic substance—as alien to the inner world as to
the outer world of men—is the one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knows
what it is or where it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet came down from
the stars with the people when great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought them for the first
time to this earth. Certainly, its only known source was a stock of pre-existing artifacts,
including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never be placed or analysed, and even its
magnetism was exerted only on its own kind. It was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hidden
people, its use being regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might cause
no inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such base metals as iron, gold, silver,
copper, or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard of the hidden people at one period of
their history.Zamacona’s reflections on the strange idol and its magnetism were disturbed
by a tremendous wave of fear as, for the first time in this silent world, he heard a rumble
of very definite and obviously approaching sound. There was no mistaking its nature. It was
a thunderously charging herd of large animals; and, remembering the Indian’s panic, the
footprints, and the moving mass distantly seen, the Spaniard shuddered in terrified anticipation.
He did not analyse his position, or the significance of this onrush of great lumbering beings,
but merely responded to an elemental urge toward self-protection. Charging herds do not stop
to find victims in obscure places, and on the outer earth Zamacona would have felt little or
no alarm in such a massive, grove-girt edifice. Some instinct, however, now bred a deep and
peculiar terror in his soul; and he looked about frantically for any means of safety.There being no available refuge in the great, gold-patined interior, he felt
that he must close the long-disused door; which still hung on its ancient hinges, doubled back
against the inner wall. Soil, vines, and moss had entered the opening from outside, so that
he had to dig a path for the great gold portal with his sword; but he managed to perform this
work very swiftly under the frightful stimulus of the approaching noise. The hoofbeats had grown
still louder and more menacing by the time he began tugging at the heavy door itself; and for
a while his fears reached a frantic height, as hope of starting the age-clogged metal grew faint.
Then, with a creak, the thing responded to his youthful strength, and a frenzied siege of pulling
and pushing ensued. Amidst the roar of unseen stampeding feet success came at last, and the
ponderous golden door clanged shut, leaving Zamacona in darkness but for the single lighted
torch he had wedged between the pillars of a basin-tripod. There was a latch, and the frightened
man blessed his patron saint that it was still effective.Sound alone told the fugitive the sequel. When the roar grew very near it resolved
itself into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen grove had made it necessary for the herd
to slacken speed and disperse. But feet continued to approach, and it became evident that the
beasts were advancing among the trees and circling the hideously carven temple walls. In the
curious deliberation of their tread Zamacona found something very alarming and repulsive, nor
did he like the scuffling sounds which were audible even through the thick stone walls and heavy
golden door. Once the door rattled ominously on its archaic hinges, as if under a heavy impact,
but fortunately it still held. Then, after a seemingly endless interval, he heard retreating
steps and realised that his unknown visitors were leaving. Since the herds did not seem to be
very numerous, it would have perhaps been safe to venture out within a half-hour or less; but
Zamacona took no chances. Opening his pack, he prepared his camp on the golden tiles of the
temple’s floor, with the great door still securely latched against all comers; drifting
eventually into a sounder sleep than he could have known in the blue-litten spaces outside.
He did not even mind the hellish, octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal
and leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness above him on its monstrously
hieroglyphed pedestal.Surrounded by darkness for the first time since leaving the tunnel, Zamacona
slept profoundly and long. He must have more than made up the sleep he had lost at his two previous
camps, when the ceaseless glare of the sky had kept him awake despite his fatigue, for much
distance was covered by other living feet while he lay in his healthily dreamless rest. It is
well that he rested deeply, for there were many strange things to be encountered in his next
period of consciousness.

IV.

What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous rapping at the door. It beat
through his dreams and dissolved all the lingering mists of drowsiness as soon as he knew what
it was. There could be no mistake about it—it was a definite, human, and peremptory rapping;
performed apparently with some metallic object, and with all the measured quality of conscious
thought or will behind it. As the awakening man rose clumsily to his feet, a sharp vocal note
was added to the summons—someone calling out, in a not unmusical voice, a formula which
the manuscript tries to represent as “oxi, oxi, giathcán ycá relex”.
Feeling sure that his visitors were men and not daemons, and arguing that they could have no
reason for considering him an enemy, Zamacona decided to face them openly and at once; and accordingly
fumbled with the ancient latch till the golden door creaked open from the pressure of those
outside.As the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood facing a group of about twenty
individuals of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm. They seemed to be Indians; though
their tasteful robes and trappings and swords were not such as he had seen among any of the
tribes of the outer world, while their faces had many subtle differences from the Indian type.
That they did not mean to be irresponsibly hostile, was very clear; for instead of menacing
him in any way they merely probed him attentively and significantly with their eyes, as if they
expected their gaze to open up some sort of communication. The longer they gazed, the more he
seemed to know about them and their mission; for although no one had spoken since the vocal
summons before the opening of the door, he found himself slowly realising that they had come
from the great city beyond the low hills, mounted on animals, and that they had been summoned
by animals who had reported his presence; that they were not sure what kind of person he was
or just where he had come from, but that they knew he must be associated with that dimly remembered
outer world which they sometimes visited in curious dreams. How he read all this in the gaze
of the two or three leaders he could not possibly explain; though he learned why a moment later.As it was, he attempted to address his visitors in the Wichita dialect he had
picked up from Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to draw a vocal reply he successively
tried the Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin tongues—adding as many scraps of lame Greek,
Galician, and Portuguese, and of the Bable peasant patois of his native Asturias, as his memory
could recall. But not even this polyglot array—his entire linguistic stock—could
bring a reply in kind. When, however, he paused in perplexity, one of the visitors began speaking
in an utterly strange and rather fascinating language whose sounds the Spaniard later had much
difficulty in representing on paper. Upon his failure to understand this, the speaker pointed
first to his own eyes, then to his forehead, and then to his eyes again, as if commanding the
other to gaze at him in order to absorb what he wanted to transmit.Zamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in possession of certain information.
The people, he learned, conversed nowadays by means of unvocal radiations of thought; although
they had formerly used a spoken language which still survived as the written tongue, and into
which they still dropped orally for tradition’s sake, or when strong feeling demanded
a spontaneous outlet. He could understand them merely by concentrating his attention upon their
eyes; and could reply by summoning up a mental image of what he wished to say, and throwing
the substance of this into his glance. When the thought-speaker paused, apparently inviting
a response, Zamacona tried his best to follow the prescribed pattern, but did not appear to
succeed very well. So he nodded, and tried to describe himself and his journey by signs. He
pointed upward, as if to the outer world, then closed his eyes and made signs as of a mole burrowing.
Then he opened his eyes again and pointed downward, in order to indicate his descent of the
great slope. Experimentally he blended a spoken word or two with his gestures—for example,
pointing successively to himself and to all of his visitors and saying “un hombre”,
and then pointing to himself alone and very carefully pronouncing his individual name, Pánfilo
de Zamacona.Before the strange conversation was over, a good deal of data had passed in
both directions. Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his thoughts, and had likewise picked
up several words of the region’s archaic spoken language. His visitors, moreover, had
absorbed many beginnings of an elementary Spanish vocabulary. Their own old language was utterly
unlike anything the Spaniard had ever heard, though there were times later on when he was to
fancy an infinitely remote linkage with the Aztec, as if the latter represented some far stage
of corruption, or some very thin infiltration of loan-words. The underground world, Zamacona
learned, bore an ancient name which the manuscript records as “Xinaián”,
but which, from the writer’s supplementary explanations and diacritical marks, could probably
be best represented to Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic arrangement K’n-yan.It is not surprising that this preliminary discourse did not go beyond the
merest essentials, but those essentials were highly important. Zamacona learned that the people
of K’n-yan were almost infinitely ancient, and that they had come from a distant part
of space where physical conditions are much like those of the earth. All this, of course, was
legend now; and one could not say how much truth was in it, or how much worship was really due
to the octopus-headed being Tulu who had traditionally brought them hither and whom they still
reverenced for aesthetic reasons. But they knew of the outer world, and were indeed the original
stock who had peopled it as soon as its crust was fit to live on. Between glacial ages they
had had some remarkable surface civilisations, especially one at the South Pole near the mountain
Kadath.At some time infinitely in the past most of the outer world had sunk beneath
the ocean, so that only a few refugees remained to bear the news to K’n-yan. This was
undoubtedly due to the wrath of space-devils hostile alike to men and to men’s gods—for
it bore out rumours of a primordially earlier sinking which had submerged the gods themselves,
including great Tulu, who still lay prisoned and dreaming in the watery vaults of the half-cosmic
city Relex. No man not a slave of the space-devils, it was argued, could live long on the outer
earth; and it was decided that all beings who remained there must be evilly connected. Accordingly
traffic with the lands of sun and starlight abruptly ceased. The subterraneous approaches to
K’n-yan, or such as could be remembered, were either blocked up or carefully guarded;
and all encroachers were treated as dangerous spies and enemies.But this was long ago. With the passing of ages fewer and fewer visitors came
to K’n-yan, and eventually sentries ceased to be maintained at the unblocked approaches.
The mass of the people forgot, except through distorted memories and myths and some very singular
dreams, that an outer world existed; though educated folk never ceased to recall the essential
facts. The last visitors ever recorded—centuries in the past—had not even been treated
as devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having long before died out. They had been questioned
eagerly about the fabulous outer regions; for scientific curiosity in K’n-yan was keen,
and the myths, memories, dreams, and historical fragments relating to the earth’s surface
had often tempted scholars to the brink of an external expedition which they had not quite dared
to attempt. The only thing demanded of such visitors was that they refrain from going back and
informing the outer world of K’n-yan’s positive existence; for after all, one could
not be sure about these outer lands. They coveted gold and silver, and might prove highly troublesome
intruders. Those who had obeyed the injunction had lived happily, though regrettably briefly,
and had told all they could about their world—little enough, however, since their accounts
were all so fragmentary and conflicting that one could hardly tell what to believe and what
to doubt. One wished that more of them would come. As for those who disobeyed and tried to escape—it
was very unfortunate about them. Zamacona himself was very welcome, for he appeared to be a
higher-grade man, and to know much more about the outer world, than anyone else who had come
down within memory. He could tell them much—and they hoped he would be reconciled to his
life-long stay.Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquy
left him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few thousand years
the phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble or
died except through violence or will. By regulating the system, one might be as physiologically
young and immortal as he wished; and the only reason why any allowed themselves to age, was
that they enjoyed the sensation in a world where stagnation and commonplaceness reigned. They
could easily become young again when they felt like it. Births had ceased, except for experimental
purposes, since a large population had been found needless by a master-race which controlled
Nature and organic rivals alike. Many, however, chose to die after a while; since despite the
cleverest efforts to invent new pleasures, the ordeal of consciousness became too dull for sensitive
souls—especially those in whom time and satiation had blinded the primal instincts and
emotions of self-preservation. All the members of the group before Zamacona were from 500 to
1500 years old; and several had seen surface visitors before, though time had blurred the recollection.
These visitors, by the way, had often tried to duplicate the longevity of the underground race;
but had been able to do so only fractionally, owing to evolutionary differences developing during
the million or two years of cleavage.These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another particular—one
far stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was the ability of the people of K’n-yan
to regulate the balance between matter and abstract energy, even where the bodies of living
organic beings were concerned, by the sheer force of the technically trained will. In other
words, with suitable effort a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialise
himself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any other object he chose;
reducing solid matter to free external particles and recombining the particles again without
damage. Had not Zamacona answered his visitors’ knock when he did, he would have discovered
this accomplishment in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain and bother of the process
prevented the twenty men from passing bodily through the golden door without pausing for a summons.
This art was much older than the art of perpetual life; and it could be taught to some extent,
though never perfectly, to any intelligent person. Rumours of it had reached the outer world
in past aeons; surviving in secret traditions and ghostly legendry. The men of K’n-yan
had been amused by the primitive and imperfect spirit tales brought down by outer-world stragglers.
In practical life this principle had certain industrial applications, but was generally suffered
to remain neglected through lack of any particular incentive to its use. Its chief surviving
form was in connexion with sleep, when for excitement’s sake many dream-connoisseurs resorted
to it to enhance the vividness of their visionary wanderings. By the aid of this method certain
dreamers even paid half-material visits to a strange, nebulous realm of mounds and valleys and
varying light which some believed to be the forgotten outer world. They would go thither on
their beasts, and in an age of peace live over the old, glorious battles of their forefathers.
Some philosophers thought that in such cases they actually coalesced with immaterial forces
left behind by these warlike ancestors themselves.The people of K’n-yan all dwelt in the great, tall city of Tsath beyond
the mountains. Formerly several races of them had inhabited the entire underground world, which
stretched down to unfathomable abysses and which included besides the blue-litten region a red-litten
region called Yoth, where relics of a still older and non-human race were found by archaeologists.
In the course of time, however, the men of Tsath had conquered and enslaved the rest; interbreeding
them with certain horned and four-footed animals of the red-litten region, whose semi-human
leanings were very peculiar, and which, though containing a certain artificially created element,
may have been in part the degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities who had left the
relics. As aeons passed, and mechanical discoveries made the business of life extremely easy,
a concentration of the people of Tsath took place; so that all the rest of K’n-yan became
relatively deserted.It was easier to live in one place, and there was no object in maintaining
a population of overflowing proportions. Many of the old mechanical devices were still in use,
though others had been abandoned when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure, or that
they were not necessary for a race of reduced numbers whose mental force could govern an extensive
array of inferior and semi-human industrial organisms. This extensive slave-class was highly
composite, being bred from ancient conquered enemies, from outer-world stragglers, from dead
bodies curiously galvanised into effectiveness, and from the naturally inferior members of the
ruling race of Tsath. The ruling type itself had become highly superior through selective breeding
and social evolution—the nation having passed through a period of idealistic industrial
democracy which gave equal opportunities to all, and thus, by raising the naturally intelligent
to power, drained the masses of all their brains and stamina. Industry, being found fundamentally
futile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings,
had become very simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardised
and easily maintained pattern, and other elemental needs were supplied by scientific agriculture
and stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned, and people went back to using the horned, half-human
beasts instead of maintaining the profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation machines
which had once threaded land, water, and air. Zamacona could scarcely believe that such things
had ever existed outside dreams, but was told he could see specimens of them in museums. He
could also see the ruins of other vast magical devices by travelling a day’s journey to
the valley of Do-Hna, to which the race had spread during its period of greatest numbers. The
cities and temples of this present plain were of a far more archaic period, and had never been
other than religious and antiquarian shrines during the supremacy of the men of Tsath.In government, Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state; habit
rather than law determining the daily order of things. This was made possible by the age-old
experience and paralysing ennui of the race, whose wants and needs were limited to physical
fundamentals and to new sensations. An aeon-long tolerance not yet undermined by growing reaction
had abolished all illusions of values and principles, and nothing but an approximation to custom
was ever sought or expected. To see that the mutual encroachments of pleasure-seeking never
crippled the mass life of the community—this was all that was desired. Family organisation
had long ago perished, and the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared. Daily
life was organised in ceremonial patterns; with games, intoxication, torture of slaves, day-dreaming,
gastronomic and emotional orgies, religious exercises, exotic experiments, artistic and philosophical
discussions, and the like, as the principal occupations. Property—chiefly land, slaves,
animals, shares in the common city enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic Tulu-metal, the
former universal money standard—was allocated on a very complex basis which included a
certain amount equally divided among all the freemen. Poverty was unknown, and labour consisted
only of certain administrative duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and selection.
Zamacona found difficulty in describing conditions so unlike anything he had previously known;
and the text of his manuscript proved unusually puzzling at this point.Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath; but
had become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at one time broken up the growth
of normal aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical tradition fatal to sound expression.
This had soon been outgrown, but had left its mark upon all pictorial and decorative attempts;
so that except for conventionalised religious designs, there was little depth or feeling in
any later work. Archaistic reproductions of earlier work had been found much preferable for
general enjoyment. Literature was all highly individual and analytical, so much so as to be
wholly incomprehensible to Zamacona. Science had been profound and accurate, and all-embracing
save in the one direction of astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling into decay, as people
found it increasingly useless to tax their minds by recalling its maddening infinitude of details
and ramifications. It was thought more sensible to abandon the deepest speculations and to confine
philosophy to conventional forms. Technology, of course, could be carried on by rule of thumb.
History was more and more neglected, but exact and copious chronicles of the past existed in
the libraries. It was still an interesting subject, and there would be a vast number to rejoice
at the fresh outer-world knowledge brought in by Zamacona. In general, though, the modern tendency
was to feel rather than to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new
diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic mystery.Religion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually believed
in the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional exaltation bred by the
mystical moods and sensuous rites which attended the colourful ancestral faith. Temples to Great
Tulu, a spirit of universal harmony anciently symbolised as the octopus-headed god who had brought
all men down from the stars, were the most richly constructed objects in all K’n-yan;
while the cryptic shrines of Yig, the principle of life symbolised as the Father of all Serpents,
were almost as lavish and remarkable. In time Zamacona learned much of the orgies and sacrifices
connected with this religion, but seemed piously reluctant to describe them in his manuscript.
He himself never participated in any of the rites save those which he mistook for perversions
of his own faith; nor did he ever lose an opportunity to try to convert the people to that faith
of the Cross which the Spaniards hoped to make universal.Prominent in the contemporary religion of Tsath was a revived and almost genuine
veneration for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu—that dark, lustrous, magnetic stuff which was
nowhere found in Nature, but which had always been with men in the form of idols and hieratic
implements. From the earliest times any sight of it in its unalloyed form had impelled respect,
while all the sacred archives and litanies were kept in cylinders wrought of its purest substance.
Now, as the neglect of science and intellect was dulling the critically analytical spirit, people
were beginning to weave around the metal once more that same fabric of awestruck superstition
which had existed in primitive times.Another function of religion was the regulation of the calendar, born of a
period when time and speed were regarded as prime fetiches in man’s emotional life. Periods
of alternate waking and sleeping, prolonged, abridged, and inverted as mood and convenience
dictated, and timed by the tail-beats of Great Yig, the Serpent, corresponded very roughly to
terrestrial days and nights; though Zamacona’s sensations told him they must actually
be almost twice as long. The year-unit, measured by Yig’s annual shedding of his skin,
was equal to about a year and a half of the outer world. Zamacona thought he had mastered this
calendar very well when he wrote his manuscript, whence the confidently given date of 1545;
but the document failed to suggest that his assurance in this matter was fully justified.As the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded with his information, Zamacona
felt a growing repulsion and alarm. It was not only what was told, but the strange, telepathic
manner of telling, and the plain inference that return to the outer world would be impossible,
that made the Spaniard wish he had never descended to this region of magic, abnormality, and
decadence. But he knew that nothing but friendly acquiescence would do as a policy, hence decided
to coöperate in all his visitors’ plans and furnish all the information they might
desire. They, on their part, were fascinated by the outer-world data which he managed haltingly
to convey.It was really the first draught of reliable surface information they had had
since the refugees straggled back from Atlantis and Lemuria aeons before, for all their subsequent
emissaries from outside had been members of narrow and local groups without any knowledge of
the world at large—Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes of the
plains. Zamacona was the first European they had ever seen, and the fact that he was a youth
of education and brilliancy made him of still more emphatic value as a source of knowledge.
The visiting party shewed their breathless interest in all he contrived to convey, and it was
plain that his coming would do much to relieve the flagging interest of weary Tsath in matters
of geography and history.The only thing which seemed to displease the men of Tsath was the fact that
curious and adventurous strangers were beginning to pour into those parts of the upper world
where the passages to K’n-yan lay. Zamacona told them of the founding of Florida and New
Spain, and made it clear that a great part of the world was stirring with the zest of adventure—Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and English. Sooner or later Mexico and Florida must meet in one great colonial
empire—and then it would be hard to keep outsiders from the rumoured gold and silver of
the abyss. Charging Buffalo knew of Zamacona’s journey into the earth. Would he tell Coronado,
or somehow let a report get to the great viceroy, when he failed to find the traveller at the
promised meeting-place? Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety of K’n-yan shewed in
the faces of the visitors, and Zamacona absorbed from their minds the fact that from now on
sentries would undoubtedly be posted once more at all the unblocked passages to the outside
world which the men of Tsath could remember.

V.

The long conversation of Zamacona and his visitors took place in the green-blue
twilight of the grove just outside the temple door. Some of the men reclined on the weeds and
moss beside the half-vanished walk, while others, including the Spaniard and the chief spokesman
of the Tsath party, sat on the occasional low monolithic pillars that lined the temple approach.
Almost a whole terrestrial day must have been consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona felt the
need of food several times, and ate from his well-stocked pack while some of the Tsath party
went back for provisions to the roadway, where they had left the animals on which they had ridden.
At length the prime leader of the party brought the discourse to a close, and indicated that
the time had come to proceed to the city.There were, he affirmed, several extra beasts in the cavalcade, upon one of
which Zamacona could ride. The prospect of mounting one of those ominous hybrid entities whose
fabled nourishment was so alarming, and a single sight of which had set Charging Buffalo into
such a frenzy of flight, was by no means reassuring to the traveller. There was, moreover, another
point about the things which disturbed him greatly—the apparently preternatural intelligence
with which some members of the previous day’s roving pack had reported his presence to
the men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition. But Zamacona was not a coward, hence
followed the men boldly down the weed-grown walk toward the road where the things were stationed.And yet he could not refrain from crying out in terror at what he saw when
he passed through the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon the ancient road. He did not
wonder that the curious Wichita had fled in panic, and had to close his eyes a moment to retain
his sanity. It is unfortunate that some sense of pious reticence prevented him from describing
fully in his manuscript the nameless sight he saw. As it is, he merely hinted at the shocking
morbidity of these great floundering white things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentary
horn in the centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace of human or anthropoid blood
in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces. They were, he declared later in his manuscript, the
most terrible objective entities he ever saw in his life, either in K’n-yan or in the
outer world. And the specific quality of their supreme terror was something apart from any easily
recognisable or describable feature. The main trouble was that they were not wholly products
of Nature.The party observed Zamacona’s fright, and hastened to reassure him as
much as possible. The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained, surely were curious things;
but were really very harmless. The flesh they ate was not that of intelligent people of the
master-race, but merely that of a special slave-class which had for the most part ceased to
be thoroughly human, and which indeed was the principal meat stock of K’n-yan. They—or
their principal ancestral element—had first been found in a wild state amidst the Cyclopean
ruins of the deserted red-litten world of Yoth which lay below the blue-litten world of K’n-yan.
That part of them was human, seemed quite clear; but men of science could never decide whether
they were actually the descendants of the bygone entities who had lived and reigned in the strange
ruins. The chief ground for such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished inhabitants
of Yoth had been quadrupedal. This much was known from the very few manuscripts and carvings
found in the vaults of Zin, beneath the largest ruined city of Yoth. But it was also known from
these manuscripts that the beings of Yoth had possessed the art of synthetically creating life,
and had made and destroyed several efficiently designed races of industrial and transportational
animals in the course of their history—to say nothing of concocting all manner of fantastic
living shapes for the sake of amusement and new sensations during the long period of decadence.
The beings of Yoth had undoubtedly been reptilian in affiliations, and most physiologists of
Tsath agreed that the present beasts had been very much inclined toward reptilianism before
they had been crossed with the mammal slave-class of K’n-yan.It argues well for the intrepid fire of those Renaissance Spaniards who conquered
half the unknown world, that Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez actually mounted one
of the morbid beasts of Tsath and fell into place beside the leader of the cavalcade—the
man named Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, who had been most active in the previous exchange of information.
It was a repulsive business; but after all, the seat was very easy, and the gait of the clumsy
gyaa-yoth surprisingly even and regular. No saddle was necessary, and the animal appeared
to require no guidance whatever. The procession moved forward at a brisk gait, stopping only
at certain abandoned cities and temples about which Zamacona was curious, and which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
was obligingly ready to display and explain. The largest of these towns, B’graa, was a
marvel of finely wrought gold, and Zamacona studied the curiously ornate architecture with avid
interest. Buildings tended toward height and slenderness, with roofs bursting into a multitude
of pinnacles. The streets were narrow, curving, and occasionally picturesquely hilly, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
said that the later cities of K’n-yan were far more spacious and regular in design. All
these old cities of the plain shewed traces of levelled walls—reminders of the archaic
days when they had been successively conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.There was one object along the route which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited on
his own initiative, even though it involved a detour of about a mile along a vine-tangled side
path. This was a squat, plain temple of black basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing
only a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable thing about it was its story, for it was a link
with a fabled elder world compared to which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday. It had
been built in imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible
black toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts.
It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption by the people of K’n-yan
had lent its name to the city which was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend
said that it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten world—a black
realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light at all, but which had had great civilisations
and mighty gods before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into being. Many images
of Tsathoggua existed in Yoth, all of which were alleged to have come from the black inner realm,
and which were supposed by Yothic archaeologists to represent the aeon-extinct race of that
realm. The black realm called N’kai in the Yothic manuscripts had been explored as thoroughly
as possible by these archaeologists, and singular stone troughs or burrows had excited infinite
speculation.When the men of K’n-yan discovered the red-litten world and deciphered
its strange manuscripts, they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought all the frightful toad
images up to the land of blue light—housing them in shrines of Yoth-quarried basalt like
the one Zamacona now saw. The cult flourished until it almost rivalled the ancient cults of
Yig and Tulu, and one branch of the race even took it to the outer world, where the smallest
of the images eventually found a shrine at Olathoë, in the land of Lomar near the earth’s
north pole. It was rumoured that this outer-world cult survived even after the great ice-sheet
and the hairy Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but of such matters not much was definitely known in
K’n-yan. In that world of blue light the cult came to an abrupt end, even though the name
of Tsath was suffered to remain.What ended the cult was the partial exploration of the black realm of N’kai
beneath the red-litten world of Yoth. According to the Yothic manuscripts, there was no surviving
life in N’kai, but something must have happened in the aeons between the days of Yoth
and the coming of men to the earth; something perhaps not unconnected with the end of Yoth.
Probably it had been an earthquake, opening up lower chambers of the lightless world which had
been closed against the Yothic archaeologists; or perhaps some more frightful juxtaposition
of energy and electrons, wholly inconceivable to any sort of vertebrate minds, had taken place.
At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with
their great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed
along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not
toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime
that took temporary shapes for various purposes. The explorers of K’n-yan did not pause
for detailed observations, and those who escaped alive sealed the passage leading from red-litten
Yoth down into the gulfs of nether horror. Then all the images of Tsathoggua in the land of
K’n-yan were dissolved into the ether by disintegrating rays, and the cult was abolished
forever.Aeons later, when naive fears were outgrown and supplanted by scientific curiosity,
the old legends of Tsathoggua and N’kai were recalled, and a suitably armed and equipped
exploring party went down to Yoth to find the closed gate of the black abyss and see what might
still lie beneath. But they could not find the gate, nor could any man ever do so in all the
ages that followed. Nowadays there were those who doubted that any abyss had ever existed, but
the few scholars who could still decipher the Yothic manuscripts believed that the evidence
for such a thing was adequate, even though the middle records of K’n-yan, with accounts
of the one frightful expedition into N’kai, were more open to question. Some of the later
religious cults tried to suppress remembrance of N’kai’s existence, and attached
severe penalties to its mention; but these had not begun to be taken seriously at the time of
Zamacona’s advent to K’n-yan.As the cavalcade returned to the old highway and approached the low range of
mountains, Zamacona saw that the river was very close on the left. Somewhat later, as the terrain
rose, the stream entered a gorge and passed through the hills, while the road traversed the
gap at a rather higher level close to the brink. It was about this time that light rainfall
came. Zamacona noticed the occasional drops and drizzle, and looked up at the coruscating blue
air, but there was no diminution of the strange radiance. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn then told him
that such condensations and precipitations of water-vapour were not uncommon, and that they
never dimmed the glare of the vault above. A kind of mist, indeed, always hung about the lowlands
of K’n-yan, and compensated for the complete absence of true clouds.The slight rise of the mountain pass enabled Zamacona, by looking behind, to
see the ancient and deserted plain in panorama as he had seen it from the other side. He seems
to have appreciated its strange beauty, and to have vaguely regretted leaving it; for he speaks
of being urged by Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn to drive his beast more rapidly. When he faced frontward
again he saw that the crest of the road was very near; the weed-grown way leading starkly up
and ending against a blank void of blue light. The scene was undoubtedly highly impressive—a
steep green mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm on the left with another green mountain
wall beyond it, and ahead, the churning sea of bluish coruscations into which the upward path
dissolved. Then came the crest itself, and with it the world of Tsath outspread in a stupendous
forward vista.Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for it
was a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever seen or dreamed of. The downward
slope of the hill itself was relatively thinly strown with small farms and occasional temples;
but beyond it lay an enormous plain covered like a chess board with planted trees, irrigated
by narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded by wide, geometrically precise roads of gold
or basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreading
buildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in some places one could
see lines of partly ruinous pillars without cables. Moving objects shewed the fields to be under
tillage, and in some cases Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the repulsive,
half-human quadrupeds.But most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered spires and
pinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered flower-like and spectral in the
coruscating blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was a mountain covered with houses and
temples, like some of the picturesque hill cities of his own Spain, but a second glance shewed
him that it was not indeed such. It was a city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching
towers that its outline was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish haze,
through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of radiance from the million
golden minarets. Glancing at Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous,
gigantic, and omnipotent city of Tsath.As the road turned downward toward the plain, Zamacona felt a kind of uneasiness
and sense of evil. He did not like the beast he rode, or the world that could provide such a
beast, and he did not like the atmosphere that brooded over the distant city of Tsath. When
the cavalcade began to pass occasional farms, the Spaniard noticed the forms that worked in
the fields; and did not like their motions and proportions, or the mutilations he saw on most
of them. Moreover, he did not like the way that some of these forms were herded in corrals,
or the way they grazed on the heavy verdure. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn indicated that these beings
were members of the slave-class, and that their acts were controlled by the master of the farm,
who gave them hypnotic impressions in the morning of all they were to do during the day. As
semi-conscious machines, their industrial efficiency was nearly perfect. Those in the corrals
were inferior specimens, classified merely as livestock.Upon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the larger farms and noted the almost
human work performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn. He likewise observed the more manlike
shapes that toiled along the furrows, and felt a curious fright and disgust toward certain of
them whose motions were more mechanical than those of the rest. These, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
explained, were what men called the y’m-bhi—organisms which had died, but
which had been mechanically reanimated for industrial purposes by means of atomic energy and
thought-power. The slave-class did not share the immortality of the freemen of Tsath, so that
with time the number of y’m-bhi had become very large. They were dog-like and faithful,
but not so readily amenable to thought-commands as were living slaves. Those which most repelled
Zamacona were those whose mutilations were greatest; for some were wholly headless, while others
had suffered singular and seemingly capricious subtractions, distortions, transpositions, and
graftings in various places. The Spaniard could not account for this condition, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
made it clear that these were slaves who had been used for the amusement of the people in some
of the vast arenas; for the men of Tsath were connoisseurs of delicate sensation, and required
a constant supply of fresh and novel stimuli for their jaded impulses. Zamacona, though by no
means squeamish, was not favourably impressed by what he saw and heard.Approached more closely, the vast metropolis became dimly horrible in its monstrous
extent and inhuman height. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained that the upper parts of the great
towers were no longer used, and that many had been taken down to avoid the bother of maintenance.
The plain around the original urban area was covered with newer and smaller dwellings, which
in many cases were preferred to the ancient towers. From the whole mass of gold and stone a
monotonous roar of activity droned outward over the plain, while cavalcades and streams of wagons
were constantly entering and leaving over the great gold- or stone-paved roads.Several times Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew Zamacona some particular
object of interest, especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-Named One
which lined the road at infrequent intervals, each in its embowering grove according to the
custom of K’n-yan. These temples, unlike those of the deserted plain beyond the mountains,
were still in active use; large parties of mounted worshippers coming and going in constant
streams. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into each of them, and the Spaniard watched the
subtle orgiastic rites with fascination and repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug and Yeb sickened
him especially—so much, indeed, that he refrained from describing them in his manuscript.
One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine
of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind
of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious.
What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring
sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.Close to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and well within the shadow of its
terrifying towers, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular building before which
enormous crowds were lined up. This, he indicated, was one of the many amphitheatres where curious
sports and sensations were provided for the weary people of K’n-yan. He was about to pause
and usher Zamacona inside the vast curved facade, when the Spaniard, recalling the mutilated
forms he had seen in the fields, violently demurred. This was the first of those friendly clashes
of taste which were to convince the people of Tsath that their guest followed strange and narrow
standards.Tsath itself was a network of strange and ancient streets; and despite a growing
sense of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled by its intimations of mystery and cosmic
wonder. The dizzy giganticism of its overawing towers, the monstrous surge of teeming life through
its ornate avenues, the curious carvings on its doorways and windows, the odd vistas glimpsed
from balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, and the enveloping grey haze which seemed
to press down on the gorge-like streets in low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce such
a sense of adventurous expectancy as he had never known before. He was taken at once to a council
of executives which held forth in a gold-and-copper palace behind a gardened and fountained
park, and was for some time subjected to close, friendly questioning in a vaulted hall frescoed
with vertiginous arabesques. Much was expected of him, he could see, in the way of historical
information about the outside earth; but in return all the mysteries of K’n-yan would
be unveiled to him. The one great drawback was the inexorable ruling that he might never return
to the world of sun and stars and Spain which was his.A daily programme was laid down for the visitor, with time apportioned judiciously
among several kinds of activities. There were to be conversations with persons of learning in
various places, and lessons in many branches of Tsathic lore. Liberal periods of research were
allowed for, and all the libraries of K’n-yan both secular and sacred were to be thrown
open to him as soon as he might master the written languages. Rites and spectacles were to be
attended—except when he might especially object—and much time would be left for
the enlightened pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation which formed the goal and nucleus
of daily life. A house in the suburbs or an apartment in the city would be assigned him, and
he would be initiated into one of the large affection-groups, including many noblewomen of the
most extreme and art-enhanced beauty, which in latter-day K’n-yan took the place of family
units. Several horned gyaa-yothn would be provided for his transportation and errand-running,
and ten living slaves of intact body would serve to conduct his establishment and protect him
from thieves and sadists and religious orgiasts on the public highways. There were many mechanical
devices which he must learn to use, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn would instruct him immediately
regarding the principal ones.Upon his choosing an apartment in preference to a suburban villa, Zamacona
was dismissed by the executives with great courtesy and ceremony, and was led through several
gorgeous streets to a cliff-like carven structure of some seventy or eighty floors. Preparations
for his arrival had already been instituted, and in a spacious ground-floor suite of vaulted
rooms slaves were busy adjusting hangings and furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid tabourets,
velvet and silk reclining-corners and squatting-cushions, and infinite rows of teakwood and
ebony pigeon-holes with metal cylinders containing some of the manuscripts he was soon to read—standard
classics which all urban apartments possessed. Desks with great stacks of membrane-paper and
pots of the prevailing green pigment were in every room—each with graded sets of pigment
brushes and other odd bits of stationery. Mechanical writing devices stood on ornate golden
tripods, while over all was shed a brilliant blue light from energy-globes set in the ceiling.
There were windows, but at this shadowy ground-level they were of scant illuminating value.
In some of the rooms were elaborate baths, while the kitchen was a maze of technical contrivances.
Supplies were brought, Zamacona was told, through the network of underground passages which
lay beneath Tsath, and which had once accommodated curious mechanical transports. There was
a stable on that underground level for the beasts, and Zamacona would presently be shewn how
to find the nearest runway to the street. Before his inspection was finished, the permanent
staff of slaves arrived and were introduced; and shortly afterward there came some half-dozen
freemen and noblewomen of his future affection-group, who were to be his companions for several
days, contributing what they could to his instruction and amusement. Upon their departure, another
party would take their place, and so onward in rotation through a group of about fifty members.

VI.

Thus was Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez absorbed for four years
into the life of the sinister city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world of K’n-yan.
All that he learned and saw and did is clearly not told in his manuscript; for a pious reticence
overcame him when he began to write in his native Spanish tongue, and he dared not set down
everything. Much he consistently viewed with repulsion, and many things he steadfastly refrained
from seeing or doing or eating. For other things he atoned by frequent countings of the beads
of his rosary. He explored the entire world of K’n-yan, including the deserted machine-cities
of the middle period on the gorse-grown plain of Nith, and made one descent into the red-litten
world of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins. He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery which
left him breathless, and beheld human metamorphoses, dematerialisations, rematerialisations,
and reanimations which made him cross himself again and again. His very capacity for astonishment
was blunted by the plethora of new marvels which every day brought him.But the longer he stayed, the more he wished to leave, for the inner life of
K’n-yan was based on impulses very plainly outside his radius. As he progressed in historical
knowledge, he understood more; but understanding only heightened his distaste. He felt that
the people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than they
knew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading them
rapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror. His own visit, he could see,
had accelerated their unrest; not only by introducing fears of outside invasion, but by exciting
in many a wish to sally forth and taste the diverse external world he described. As time progressed,
he noticed an increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an amusement;
so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a veritable Witches’ Sabbath
of transmutations, age-adjustments, death-experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredom
and restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing apace. There was more
and more cosmic abnormality, more and more curious sadism, more and more ignorance and superstition,
and more and more desire to escape out of physical life into a half-spectral state of electronic
dispersal.All his efforts to leave, however, came to nothing. Persuasion was useless,
as repeated trials proved; though the mature disillusion of the upper classes at first prevented
them from resenting their guest’s open wish for departure. In a year which he reckoned
as 1543 Zamacona made an actual attempt to escape through the tunnel by which he had entered
K’n-yan, but after a weary journey across the deserted plain he encountered forces in
the dark passage which discouraged him from future attempts in that direction. As a means of
sustaining hope and keeping the image of home in mind, he began about this time to make rough
draughts of the manuscript relating his adventures; delighting in the loved, old Spanish words
and the familiar letters of the Roman alphabet. Somehow he fancied he might get the manuscript
to the outer world; and to make it convincing to his fellows he resolved to enclose it in one
of the Tulu-metal cylinders used for sacred archives. That alien, magnetic substance could not
but support the incredible story he had to tell.But even as he planned, he had little real hope of ever establishing contact
with the earth’s surface. Every known gate, he knew, was guarded by persons or forces
that it were better not to oppose. His attempt at escape had not helped matters, for he could
now see a growing hostility to the outer world he represented. He hoped that no other European
would find his way in; for it was possible that later comers might not fare as well as he. He
himself had been a cherished fountain of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged status.
Others, deemed less necessary, might receive rather different treatment. He even wondered what
would happen to him when the sages of Tsath considered him drained dry of fresh facts; and in
self-defence began to be more gradual in his talks on earth-lore, conveying whenever he could
the impression of vast knowledge held in reserve.One other thing which endangered Zamacona’s status in Tsath was his persistent
curiosity regarding the ultimate abyss of N’kai, beneath red-litten Yoth, whose existence
the dominant religious cults of K’n-yan were more and more inclined to deny. When exploring
Yoth he had vainly tried to find the blocked-up entrance; and later on he experimented in the
arts of dematerialisation and projection, hoping that he might thereby be able to throw his
consciousness downward into the gulfs which his physical eyes could not discover. Though never
becoming truly proficient in these processes, he did manage to achieve a series of monstrous
and portentous dreams which he believed included some elements of actual projection into N’kai;
dreams which greatly shocked and perturbed the leaders of Yig and Tulu-worship when he related
them, and which he was advised by friends to conceal rather than exploit. In time those dreams
became very frequent and maddening; containing things which he dared not record in his main
manuscript, but of which he prepared a special record for the benefit of certain learned men
in Tsath.It may have been unfortunate—or it may have been mercifully fortunate—that
Zamacona practiced so many reticences and reserved so many themes and descriptions for subsidiary
manuscripts. The main document leaves one to guess much about the detailed manners, customs,
thoughts, language, and history of K’n-yan, as well as to form any adequate picture of
the visual aspect and daily life of Tsath. One is left puzzled, too, about the real motivations
of the people; their strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness, and their almost cringing fear
of the outer world despite their possession of atomic and dematerialising powers which would
have made them unconquerable had they taken the trouble to organise armies as in the old days.
It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy
and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery
had brought it during its middle period. Even the grotesque and repulsive customs and modes
of thought and feeling can be traced to this source; for in his historical research Zamacona
found evidence of bygone eras in which K’n-yan had held ideas much like those of the classic
and renaissance outer world, and had possessed a national character and art full of what Europeans
regard as dignity, kindness, and nobility.The more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the future
he became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and intellectual disintegration was a tremendously
deep-seated and ominously accelerating movement. Even during his stay the signs of decay multiplied.
Rationalism degenerated more and more into fanatical and orgiastic superstition, centring in
a lavish adoration of the magnetic Tulu-metal, and tolerance steadily dissolved into a series
of frenzied hatreds, especially toward the outer world of which the scholars were learning so
much from him. At times he almost feared that the people might some day lose their age-long
apathy and brokenness and turn like desperate rats against the unknown lands above them, sweeping
all before them by virtue of their singular and still-remembered scientific powers. But for
the present they fought their boredom and sense of emptiness in other ways; multiplying their
hideous emotional outlets and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality of their diversions.
The arenas of Tsath must have been accursed and unthinkable places—Zamacona never went near
them. And what they would be in another century, or even in another decade, he did not dare
to think. The pious Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads more often than usual in
those days.In the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona began what may well be accepted
as his final series of attempts to leave K’n-yan. His fresh opportunity came from an unexpected
source—a female of his affection-group who conceived for him a curious individual infatuation
based on some hereditary memory of the days of monogamous wedlock in Tsath. Over this female—a
noblewoman of moderate beauty and of at least average intelligence named T’la-yub—Zamacona
acquired the most extraordinary influence; finally inducing her to help him in an escape, under
the promise that he would let her accompany him. Chance proved a great factor in the course
of events, for T’la-yub came of a primordial family of gate-lords who had retained oral
traditions of at least one passage to the outer world which the mass of people had forgotten
even at the time of the great closing; a passage to a mound on the level plains of earth which
had, in consequence, never been sealed up or guarded. She explained that the primordial gate-lords
were not guards or sentries, but merely ceremonial and economic proprietors, half-feudal and
baronial in status, of an era preceding the severance of surface-relations. Her own family had
been so reduced at the time of the closing that their gate had been wholly overlooked; and they
had ever afterward preserved the secret of its existence as a sort of hereditary secret—a
source of pride, and of a sense of reserve power, to offset the feeling of vanished wealth and
influence which so constantly irritated them.Zamacona, now working feverishly to get his manuscript into final form in case
anything should happen to him, decided to take with him on his outward journey only five beast-loads
of unalloyed gold in the form of the small ingots used for minor decorations—enough, he calculated,
to make him a personage of unlimited power in his own world. He had become somewhat hardened
to the sight of the monstrous gyaa-yothn during his four years of residence in Tsath,
hence did not shrink from using the creatures; yet he resolved to kill and bury them, and cache
the gold, as soon as he reached the outer world, since he knew that even a glimpse of one of
the things would drive any ordinary Indian mad. Later he could arrange for a suitable expedition
to transport the treasure to Mexico. T’la-yub he would perhaps allow to share his fortunes,
for she was by no means unattractive; though possibly he would arrange for her sojourn amongst
the plains Indians, since he was not overanxious to preserve links with the manner of life in
Tsath. For a wife, of course, he would choose a lady of Spain—or at worst, an Indian princess
of normal outer-world descent and a regular and approved past. But for the present T’la-yub
must be used as a guide. The manuscript he would carry on his own person, encased in a book-cylinder
of the sacred and magnetic Tulu-metal.The expedition itself is described in the addendum to Zamacona’s manuscript,
written later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous strain. It set out amidst the most careful
precautions, choosing a rest-period and proceeding as far as possible along the faintly lighted
passages beneath the city. Zamacona and T’la-yub, disguised in slaves’ garments,
bearing provision-knapsacks, and leading the five laden beasts on foot, were readily taken for
commonplace workers; and they clung as long as possible to the subterranean way—using
a long and little-frequented branch which had formerly conducted the mechanical transports to
the now ruined suburb of L’thaa. Amidst the ruins of L’thaa they came to the surface,
thereafter passing as rapidly as possible over the deserted, blue-litten plain of Nith toward
the Grh-yan range of low hills. There, amidst the tangled underbrush, T’la-yub found the
long disused and half-fabulous entrance to the forgotten tunnel; a thing she had seen but once
before—aeons in the past, when her father had taken her thither to shew her this monument to
their family pride. It was hard work getting the laden gyaa-yothn to scrape through the
obstructing vines and briers, and one of them displayed a rebelliousness destined to bear dire
consequences—bolting away from the party and loping back toward Tsath on its detestable pads,
golden burden and all.It was nightmare work burrowing by the light of blue-ray torches upward, downward,
forward, and upward again through a dank, choked tunnel that no foot had trodden since ages
before the sinking of Atlantis; and at one point T’la-yub had to practice the fearsome
art of dematerialisation on herself, Zamacona, and the laden beasts in order to pass a point
wholly clogged by shifting earth-strata. It was a terrible experience for Zamacona; for although
he had often witnessed dematerialisation in others, and even practiced it himself to the extent
of dream-projection, he had never been fully subjected to it before. But T’la-yub was
skilled in the arts of K’n-yan, and accomplished the double metamorphosis in perfect safety.Thereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing through stalactited crypts of
horror where monstrous carvings leered at every turn; alternately camping and advancing for
a period which Zamacona reckoned as about three days, but which was probably less. At last they
came to a very narrow place where the natural or only slightly hewn cave-walls gave place to
walls of wholly artificial masonry, carved into terrible bas-reliefs. These walls, after about
a mile of steep ascent, ended with a pair of vast niches, one on each side, in which monstrous,
nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each other across the passage as
they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world. At this point the passage opened
into a prodigious vaulted and circular chamber of human construction; wholly covered with horrible
carvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched passageway with the foot of a flight of
steps. T’la-yub knew from family tales that this must be very near the earth’s surface,
but she could not tell just how near. Here the party camped for what they meant to be their
last rest-period in the subterraneous world.It must have been hours later that the clank of metal and the padding of beasts’
feet awakened Zamacona and T’la-yub. A bluish glare was spreading from the narrow passage
between the images of Yig and Tulu, and in an instant the truth was obvious. An alarm had been
given at Tsath—as was later revealed, by the returning gyaa-yoth which had rebelled at the brier-choked
tunnel-entrance—and a swift party of pursuers had come to arrest the fugitives. Resistance
was clearly useless, and none was offered. The party of twelve beast-riders proved studiously
polite, and the return commenced almost without a word or thought-message on either side.It was an ominous and depressing journey, and the ordeal of dematerialisation
and rematerialisation at the choked place was all the more terrible because of the lack of that
hope and expectancy which had palliated the process on the outward trip. Zamacona heard his
captors discussing the imminent clearing of this choked place by intensive radiations, since
henceforward sentries must be maintained at the hitherto unknown outer portal. It would not
do to let outsiders get within the passage, for then any who might escape without due treatment
would have a hint of the vastness of the inner world and would perhaps be curious enough to
return in greater strength. As with the other passages since Zamacona’s coming, sentries
must be stationed all along, as far as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn from amongst
all the slaves, the dead-alive y’m-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen. With
the overrunning of the American plains by thousands of Europeans, as the Spaniard had predicted,
every passage was a potential source of danger; and must be rigorously guarded until the technologists
of Tsath could spare the energy to prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding obliteration as they
had done for many passages in earlier and more vigorous times.Zamacona and T’la-yub were tried before three gn’agn of
the supreme tribunal in the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened and fountained park,
and the Spaniard was given his liberty because of the vital outer-world information he still
had to impart. He was told to return to his apartment and to his affection-group; taking up
his life as before, and continuing to meet deputations of scholars according to the latest schedule
he had been following. No restrictions would be imposed upon him so long as he might remain
peacefully in K’n-yan—but it was intimated that such leniency would not be repeated
after another attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that there was an element of irony in the
parting words of the chief gn’ag—an assurance that all of his gyaa-yothn,
including the one which had rebelled, would be returned to him.The fate of T’la-yub was less happy. There being no object in retaining
her, and her ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater aspect of treason than Zamacona’s
had possessed, she was ordered to be delivered to the curious diversions of the amphitheatre;
and afterward, in a somewhat mutilated and half-dematerialised form, to be given the functions
of a y’m-bhi or animated corpse-slave and stationed among the sentries guarding
the passage whose existence she had betrayed. Zamacona soon heard, not without many pangs of
regret he could scarcely have anticipated, that poor T’la-yub had emerged from the arena
in a headless and otherwise incomplete state, and had been set as an outermost guard upon the
mound in which the passage had been found to terminate. She was, he was told, a night-sentinel,
whose automatic duty was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending down reports to a small
garrison of twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly dematerialised
freemen in the vaulted, circular chamber if the approachers did not heed her warning. She worked,
he was told, in conjunction with a day-sentinel—a living freeman who chose this post in
preference to other forms of discipline for other offences against the state. Zamacona, of course,
had long known that most of the chief gate-sentries were such discredited freemen.It was now made plain to him, though indirectly, that his own penalty for another
escape-attempt would be service as a gate-sentry—but in the form of a dead-alive y’m-bhi
slave, and after amphitheatre-treatment even more picturesque than that which T’la-yub
was reported to have undergone. It was intimated that he—or parts of him—would
be reanimated to guard some inner section of the passage; within sight of others, where his
abridged person might serve as a permanent symbol of the rewards of treason. But, his informants
always added, it was of course inconceivable that he would ever court such a fate. So long as
he remained peaceably in K’n-yan, he would continue to be a free, privileged, and respected
personage.Yet in the end Pánfilo de Zamacona did court the fate so direfully hinted
to him. True, he did not really expect to encounter it; but the nervous latter part of his manuscript
makes it clear that he was prepared to face its possibility. What gave him a final hope of scatheless
escape from K’n-yan was his growing mastery of the art of dematerialisation. Having studied
it for years, and having learned still more from the two instances in which he had been subjected
to it, he now felt increasingly able to use it independently and effectively. The manuscript
records several notable experiments in this art—minor successes accomplished in his apartment—and
reflects Zamacona’s hope that he might soon be able to assume the spectral form in full,
attaining complete invisibility and preserving that condition as long as he wished.Once he reached this stage, he argued, the outward way lay open to him. Of
course he could not bear away any gold, but mere escape was enough. He would, though, dematerialise
and carry away with him his manuscript in the Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost additional
effort; for this record and proof must reach the outer world at all hazards. He now knew the
passage to follow; and if he could thread it in an atom-scattered state, he did not see how
any person or force could detect or stop him. The only trouble would be if he failed to maintain
his spectral condition at all times. That was the one ever-present peril, as he had learned
from his experiments. But must one not always risk death and worse in a life of adventure? Zamacona
was a gentleman of Old Spain; of the blood that faced the unknown and carved out half the civilisation
of the New World.For many nights after his ultimate resolution Zamacona prayed to St. Pamphilus
and other guardian saints, and counted the beads of his rosary. The last entry in the manuscript,
which toward the end took the form of a diary more and more, was merely a single sentence—“Es
más tarde de lo que pensaba—tengo que marcharme”. . . .
“It is later than I thought; I must go.” After that, only silence and conjecture—and
such evidence as the presence of the manuscript itself, and what that manuscript could lead
to, might provide.

VII.

When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading and note-taking the morning
sun was high in the heavens. The electric bulb was still burning, but such things of the real
world—the modern outer world—were far from my whirling brain. I knew I was in my
room at Clyde Compton’s at Binger—but upon what monstrous vista had I stumbled?
Was this thing a hoax or a chronicle of madness? If a hoax, was it a jest of the sixteenth century
or of today? The manuscript’s age looked appallingly genuine to my not wholly unpracticed
eyes, and the problem presented by the strange metal cylinder I dared not even think about.Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the baffling
phenomena of the mound—of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical actions of diurnal
and nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer cases of madness and disappearance! It was even an accursedly
plausible explanation—evilly consistent—if one could adopt the incredible.
It must be a shocking hoax devised by someone who knew all the lore of the mound. There was
even a hint of social satire in the account of that unbelievable nether world of horror and
decay. Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic—something like the leaden
crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of
some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.Upon going down to breakfast I hardly knew what to tell Compton and his mother,
as well as the curious callers who had already begun to arrive. Still in a daze, I cut the Gordian
Knot by giving a few points from the notes I had made, and mumbling my belief that the thing
was a subtle and ingenious fraud left there by some previous explorer of the mound—a belief
in which everybody seemed to concur when told of the substance of the manuscript. It is curious
how all that breakfast group—and all the others in Binger to whom the discussion was repeated—seemed
to find a great clearing of the atmosphere in the notion that somebody was playing a joke on
somebody. For the time we all forgot that the known, recent history of the mound presented mysteries
as strange as any in the manuscript, and as far from acceptable solution as ever.The fears and doubts began to return when I asked for volunteers to visit the
mound with me. I wanted a larger excavating party—but the idea of going to that uncomfortable
place seemed no more attractive to the people of Binger than it had seemed on the previous day.
I myself felt a mounting horror upon looking toward the mound and glimpsing the moving speck
which I knew was the daylight sentinel; for in spite of all my scepticism the morbidities of
that manuscript stuck by me and gave everything connected with the place a new and monstrous
significance. I absolutely lacked the resolution to look at the moving speck with my binoculars.
Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado we display in nightmares—when, knowing we
are dreaming, we plunge desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the whole
thing over the sooner. My pick and shovel were already out there, so I had only my handbag of
smaller paraphernalia to take. Into this I put the strange cylinder and its contents, feeling
vaguely that I might possibly find something worth checking up with some part of the green-lettered
Spanish text. Even a clever hoax might be founded on some actual attribute of the mound which
a former explorer had discovered—and that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey Eagle’s
cryptic talisman still hung from its leathern cord around my neck.I did not look very sharply at the mound as I walked toward it, but when I
reached it there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward scramble of the previous day, I was
troubled by thoughts of what might lie close at hand if, by any miracle, any part
of the manuscript were actually half-true. In such a case, I could not help reflecting,
the hypothetical Spaniard Zamacona must have barely reached the outer world when overtaken by
some disaster—perhaps an involuntary rematerialisation. He would naturally, in that event,
have been seized by whichever sentry happened to be on duty at the time—either the discredited
freeman, or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very T’la-yub who had planned and aided
his first attempt at escape—and in the ensuing struggle the cylinder with the manuscript
might well have been dropped on the mound’s summit, to be neglected and gradually buried
for nearly four centuries. But, I added, as I climbed over the crest, one must not think of
extravagant things like that. Still, if there were anything in the tale, it must have
been a monstrous fate to which Zamacona had been dragged back . . . the amphitheatre . . .
mutilation . . . duty somewhere in the dank, nitrous tunnel as a dead-alive slave . . .
a maimed corpse-fragment as an automatic interior sentry. . . .It was a very real shock which chased this morbid speculation from my head,
for upon glancing around the elliptical summit I saw at once that my pick and shovel had been
stolen. This was a highly provoking and disconcerting development; baffling, too, in view of
the seeming reluctance of all the Binger folk to visit the mound. Was this reluctance a pretended
thing, and had the jokers of the village been chuckling over my coming discomfiture as they
solemnly saw me off ten minutes before? I took out my binoculars and scanned the gaping crowd
at the edge of the village. No—they did not seem to be looking for any comic climax; yet
was not the whole affair at bottom a colossal joke in which all the villagers and reservation
people were concerned—legends, manuscript, cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had seen
the sentry from a distance, and then found him unaccountably vanished; thought also of the conduct
of old Grey Eagle, of the speech and expressions of Compton and his mother, and of the unmistakable
fright of most of the Binger people. On the whole, it could not very well be a village-wide
joke. The fear and the problem were surely real, though obviously there were one or two jesting
daredevils in Binger who had stolen out to the mound and made off with the tools I had left.Everything else on the mound was as I had left it—brush cut by my machete,
slight, bowl-like depression toward the north end, and the hole I had made with my trench-knife
in digging up the magnetism-revealed cylinder. Deeming it too great a concession to the unknown
jokers to return to Binger for another pick and shovel, I resolved to carry out my programme
as best I could with the machete and trench-knife in my handbag; so extracting these, I set
to work excavating the bowl-like depression which my eye had picked as the possible site of
a former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded, I felt again the suggestion of a sudden wind
blowing against me which I had noticed the day before—a suggestion which seemed stronger,
and still more reminiscent of unseen, formless, opposing hands laid on my wrists, as I cut deeper
and deeper through the root-tangled red soil and reached the exotic black loam beneath. The
talisman around my neck appeared to twitch oddly in the breeze—not in any one direction,
as when attracted by the buried cylinder, but vaguely and diffusely, in a manner wholly unaccountable.Then, quite without warning, the black, root-woven earth beneath my feet began
to sink cracklingly, while I heard a faint sound of sifting, falling matter far below me. The
obstructing wind, or forces, or hands now seemed to be operating from the very seat of the sinking,
and I felt that they aided me by pushing as I leaped back out of the hole to avoid being involved
in any cave-in. Bending down over the brink and hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle with
my machete, I felt that they were against me again—but at no time were they strong enough
to stop my work. The more roots I severed, the more falling matter I heard below. Finally the
hole began to deepen of itself toward the centre, and I saw that the earth was sifting down
into some large cavity beneath, so as to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots that had
bound it were gone. A few more hacks of the machete did the trick, and with a parting cave-in
and uprush of curiously chill and alien air the last barrier gave way. Under the morning sun
yawned a huge opening at least three feet square, and shewing the top of a flight of stone steps
down which the loose earth of the collapse was still sliding. My quest had come to something
at last! With an elation of accomplishment almost overbalancing fear for the nonce, I replaced
the trench-knife and machete in my handbag, took out my powerful electric torch, and prepared
for a triumphant, lone, and utterly rash invasion of the fabulous nether world I had uncovered.It was rather hard getting down the first few steps, both because of the fallen
earth which had choked them and because of a sinister up-pushing of a cold wind from below.
The talisman around my neck swayed curiously, and I began to regret the disappearing square
of daylight above me. The electric torch shewed dank, water-stained, and salt-encrusted walls
fashioned of huge basalt blocks, and now and then I thought I descried some trace of carving
beneath the nitrous deposits. I gripped my handbag more tightly, and was glad of the comforting
weight of the sheriff’s heavy revolver in my right-hand coat pocket. After a time the
passage began to wind this way and that, and the staircase became free from obstructions. Carvings
on the walls were now definitely traceable, and I shuddered when I saw how clearly the grotesque
figures resembled the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder I had found. Winds and forces continued
to blow malevolently against me, and at one or two bends I half fancied the torch gave glimpses
of thin, transparent shapes not unlike the sentinel on the mound as my binoculars had shewed
him. When I reached this stage of visual chaos I stopped for a moment to get a grip on myself.
It would not do to let my nerves get the better of me at the very outset of what would surely
be a trying experience, and the most important archaeological feat of my career.But I wished I had not stopped at just that place, for the act fixed my attention
on something profoundly disturbing. It was only a small object lying close to the wall on one
of the steps below me, but that object was such as to put my reason to a severe test, and bring
up a line of the most alarming speculations. That the opening above me had been closed against
all material forms for generations was utterly obvious from the growth of shrub-roots and accumulation
of drifting soil; yet the object before me was most distinctly not many generations old. For
it was an electric torch much like the one I now carried—warped and encrusted in the tomb-like
dampness, but none the less perfectly unmistakable. I descended a few steps and picked it up,
wiping off the evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the nickel bands bore an engraved name
and address, and I recognised it with a start the moment I made it out. It read “Jas.
C. Williams, 17 Trowbridge St., Cambridge, Mass.”—and I knew that it had belonged
to one of the two daring college instructors who had disappeared on June 28, 1915. Only thirteen
years ago, and yet I had just broken through the sod of centuries! How had the thing got there?
Another entrance—or was there something after all in this mad idea of dematerialisation
and rematerialisation?Doubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still farther down the seemingly endless
staircase. Would the thing never stop? The carvings grew more and more distinct, and assumed
a narrative pictorial quality which brought me close to panic as I recognised many unmistakable
correspondences with the history of K’n-yan as sketched in the manuscript now resting
in my handbag. For the first time I began seriously to question the wisdom of my descent, and
to wonder whether I had not better return to the upper air before I came upon
something which would never let me return as a sane man. But I did not hesitate long, for as
a Virginian I felt the blood of ancestral fighters and gentlemen-adventurers pounding a protest
against retreat from any peril known or unknown.My descent became swifter rather than slower, and I avoided studying the terrible
bas-reliefs and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at once I saw an arched opening ahead, and
realised that the prodigious staircase had ended at last. But with that realisation came horror
in mounting magnitude, for before me there yawned a vast vaulted crypt of all-too-familiar outline—a
great circular space answering in every least particular to the carving-lined chamber described
in the Zamacona manuscript.It was indeed the place. There could be no mistake. And if any room for doubt
yet remained, that room was abolished by what I saw directly across the great vault. It was
a second arched opening, commencing a long, narrow passage and having at its mouth two huge
opposite niches bearing loathsome and titanic images of shockingly familiar pattern. There in
the dark unclean Yig and hideous Tulu squatted eternally, glaring at each other across the passage
as they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world.From this point onward I ask no credence for what I tell—for what I
think I saw. It is too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous and incredible, to be any
part of sane human experience or objective reality. My torch, though casting a powerful beam
ahead, naturally could not furnish any general illumination of the Cyclopean crypt; so I now
began moving it about to explore the giant walls little by little. As I did so, I saw to my
horror that the space was by no means vacant, but was instead littered with odd furniture and
utensils and heaps of packages which bespoke a populous recent occupancy—no nitrous reliques
of the past, but queerly shaped objects and supplies in modern, every-day use. As my torch rested
on each article or group of articles, however, the distinctness of the outlines soon began to
grow blurred; until in the end I could scarcely tell whether the things belonged to the realm
of matter or to the realm of spirit.All this while the adverse winds blew against me with increasing fury, and
the unseen hands plucked malevolently at me and snatched at the strange magnetic talisman I
wore. Wild conceits surged through my mind. I thought of the manuscript and what it said about
the garrison stationed in this place—twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living
but partly dematerialised freemen—that was in 1545—three hundred and eighty-three years
ago. . . . What since then? Zamacona had predicted change . . . subtle disintegration . . .
more dematerialisation . . . weaker and weaker . . . was it Grey Eagle’s
talisman that held them at bay—their sacred Tulu-metal—and were they feebly trying to
pluck it off so that they might do to me what they had done to those who had come before? . . .
It occurred to me with shuddering force that I was building my speculations out of a full belief
in the Zamacona manuscript—this must not be—I must get a grip on myself—But, curse it, every time I tried to get a grip I saw some fresh sight to shatter
my poise still further. This time, just as my will power was driving the half-seen paraphernalia
into obscurity, my glance and torch-beam had to light on two things of very different nature;
two things of the eminently real and sane world; yet they did more to unseat my shaky reason
than anything I had seen before—because I knew what they were, and knew how profoundly,
in the course of Nature, they ought not to be there. They were my own missing pick and shovel,
side by side, and leaning neatly against the blasphemously carved wall of that hellish crypt.
God in heaven—and I had babbled to myself about daring jokers from Binger!That was the last straw. After that the cursed hypnotism of the manuscript
got at me, and I actually saw the half-transparent shapes of the things that were pushing
and plucking; pushing and plucking—those leprous palaeogean things with something of humanity
still clinging to them—the complete forms, and the forms that were morbidly and
perversely incomplete . . . all these, and hideous other entities—the
four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and projecting horn . . . and not
a sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth. . . .Then there was a sound—a flopping; a padding; a dull, advancing
sound which heralded beyond question a being as structurally material as the pickaxe and the
shovel—something wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that ringed me in, yet equally remote
from any sort of life as life is understood on the earth’s wholesome surface. My shattered
brain tried to prepare me for what was coming, but could not frame any adequate image. I could
only say over and over again to myself, “It is of the abyss, but it is not dematerialised.”
The padding grew more distinct, and from the mechanical cast of the tread I knew it was a dead
thing that stalked in the darkness. Then—oh, God, I saw it in the full beam of my torch;
saw it framed like a sentinel in the narrow passage between the nightmare idols of the serpent
Yig and the octopus Tulu. . . .Let me collect myself enough to hint at what I saw; to explain why I dropped
torch and handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter blackness, wrapped in a merciful unconsciousness
which did not wear off until the sun and the distant yelling and the shouting from the village
roused me as I lay gasping on the top of the accursed mound. I do not yet know what guided me
again to the earth’s surface. I only know that the watchers in Binger saw me stagger up
into sight three hours after I had vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat on the ground as
if struck by a bullet. None of them dared to come out and help me; but they knew I must be in
a bad state, so tried to rouse me as best they could by yelling in chorus and firing off revolvers.It worked in the end, and when I came to I almost rolled down the side of the
mound in my eagerness to get away from that black aperture which still yawned open. My torch
and tools, and the handbag with the manuscript, were all down there; but it is easy to see why
neither I nor anyone else ever went after them. When I staggered across the plain and into the
village I dared not tell what I had seen. I only muttered vague things about carvings and statues
and snakes and shaken nerves. And I did not faint again until somebody mentioned that the ghost-sentinel
had reappeared about the time I had staggered half way back to town. I left Binger that evening,
and have never been there since, though they tell me the ghosts still appear on the mound as
usual.But I have resolved to hint here at last what I dared not hint to the people
of Binger on that terrible August afternoon. I don’t know yet just how I can go about
it—and if in the end you think my reticence strange, just remember that to imagine such
a horror is one thing, but to see it is another thing. I saw it. I think you’ll
recall my citing early in this tale the case of a bright young man named Heaton who went out
to that mound one day in 1891 and came back at night as the village idiot, babbling for eight
years about horrors and then dying in an epileptic fit. What he used to keep moaning was “That
white man—oh, my God, what they did to him. . . .”Well, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton saw—and I saw it after reading
the manuscript, so I know more of its history than he did. That makes it worse—for I know
all that it implies; all that must be still brooding and festering and waiting down there.
I told you it had padded mechanically toward me out of the narrow passage and had stood sentry-like
at the entrance between the frightful eidola of Yig and Tulu. That was very natural and inevitable—because
the thing was a sentry. It had been made a sentry for punishment, and it was quite dead—besides
lacking head, arms, lower legs, and other customary parts of a human being. Yes—it had
been a very human being once; and what is more, it had been white. Very obviously, if
that manuscript was as true as I think it was, this being had been used for the diversions
of the amphitheatre before its life had become wholly extinct and supplanted by automatic
impulses controlled from outside.On its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed or
branded—I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that they were in an awkward
and fumbling Spanish; an awkward Spanish implying a kind of ironic use of the language by an
alien inscriber familiar neither with the idiom nor the Roman letters used to record it. The
inscription had read “Secuestrado a la voluntad de Xinaián en el cuerpo decapitado
de Tlayúb”—“Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body
of T’la-yub.”